Household Retirement Saving

This document is about examining how households divide retirement contributions and assets between spouses' individual retirement accounts. The authors use data from the Health and Retirement Study and Survey of Consumer Finances to investigate how retirement savings are located within a couple, whether households effectively locate savings across accounts to take advantage of factors like employer matches or age differences, and the reliability of spousal reporting on each other's retirement accounts. The findings suggest that contributions and assets tend to be concentrated in the husband's or primary earner's accounts, driven largely by the distribution of earnings within couples rather than optimal savings strategies.