Abstract
This study assessed Latinos’ retirement security, including their financial resources and retirement needs, showing past trends and future prospects. Using data from the American Community Survey, decennial censuses, and Health and Retirement Study, tabulations compared poverty rates, income and wealth, health and disability, relationship status, and household composition for Latinos and non-Latinos ages 65 and older. The Urban Institute’s Dynamic Simulation of Income Model also projected income and wealth for future generations. The results show that older Latinos receive less income, hold less wealth, and are more likely to be impoverished than older non-Latino whites. Financial outcomes are significantly worse for older foreign-born Latinos than for those born in the United States. However, projections indicate that the gaps will narrow somewhat in coming decades. Various policy options, such as workforce development initiatives, efforts to promote education and retirement savings, and Social Security reforms that increase benefit progressivity could improve financial security for future Hispanic retirees.
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We adjusted income amounts for household size by dividing family income by the square root of the number of family members. This is a common approach in the literature (e.g., Litwin and Sapir 2009; Bremer 2014), which enabled us to more accurately approximate the resources available to families given racial and ethnic differences in household size and the economies of scale in household production that favor larger households.
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Multigenerational households are defined here as a household that includes three or more generations, two nonadjacent generations (such as a grandparent and grandchild without the presence of the grandparent’s child) or two adjacent generations in which some members of the younger generations are married or older than 17.
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Johnson, R.W., Mudrazija, S., Wang, C.X. (2019). Older Latinos’ Financial Security: Resources, Needs, and Future Prospects. In: Vega, W., Angel, J., Gutiérrez Robledo, L., Markides, K. (eds) Contextualizing Health and Aging in the Americas. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00584-9_11
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