Answer: Save money

Questions:

• Why do you think so many seniors wished they had saved more?
• Without savings, what income does a retired senior citizen have to live on? 
• Are you a good saver? If not, do you have any ideas that can help you become one? 

Here's the ready-to-go slides for this Question of the Day that you can use in your classroom.

Behind the numbers (National Bureau of Economic Research):

We asked persons aged 60 to 79 whether, if they were given the chance to live their lives over again, they would have saved differently earlier in their lives. As we will show in this paper, depending on how the question was framed, some 61 percent to 67 percent said they should have saved more (“had saving regret”). We asked respondents to tell us which spending categories would have been targets for reduction in spending earlier in life. Respondents who could not name a spending category for reduction were permitted to revise their earlier expression of saving regret, but just 6.3 percent to 9 percent of those who had expressed saving regret revised their answers, reducing the observed prevalence of saving regret by between 4 and 5 percentage points. Accounting for those revisions, we found that 59 percent of the population aged 60 to 79 wished they had saved more.

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.