Retirement Security Glass Half Full and Half Empty, GAO Says

Sometimes whether news is good or bad depends on one’s perspective. Case in point: the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has updated its 2015 report on retirement security and savings in households headed by people approaching retirement age. The updated report contains fodder for optimists and pessimists alike.

In response to a request from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the GAO updated its 2015 report, “Retirement Security: Most Households Approaching Retirement Have Low Savings” The GAO shows that by several gauges, retirement savings have improved from 2013, the year that yielded the data on which the 2015 report was based to 2016, the most recent year for which the Survey of Consumer Finances data is available. Improved, but only slightly.

For the optimists in the room: the GAO reports slight improvement in several measures of retirement savings for households headed by someone age 55 or older.

The report shows that there are more households headed by someone age 55 or older with retirement savings, more with retirement savings if they lack a pension plan, more with both savings and a pension, and slightly fewer with a pension plan but no retirement savings.

For the pessimists: even with the slight improvements that the GAO reports, only slightly more than half of households studied have retirement savings. And improvements, while present, are minor.
A caveat: The most recent data is from 2016, and reported in the most recent Survey of Consumer Finances which was released in September 2017. It is possible that results would be different if they included data from years since then.

The newly updayed GAO report is available here.