The responsibility to save and contribute to a pension is increasingly left to the individual worker. Understanding how households save and prepare for retirement is of paramount importance. There is concern in the U.S. that many families have little or no wealth even close to retirement. In this project, I use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative sample of the cohort born between 1931 to 1941, to examine the financial situation of older households and their retirement plans. I first show that many families have not thought about retirement even though they are a few years away from retirement and the event is imminent. This finding confirms the results of other surveys, such as the Retirement Confidence Survey, that show that a large majority of workers have not made any plans for retirement.
