How Much Risk is Acceptable?

The brief’s key findings are:

• The financial crisis suggests the need for a new universal tier of retirement saving to supplement Social Security and 401(k)s.

• If the tier were a defined contribution system, asset levels would vary with market returns and payouts with interest rates.

• Replacement rates would fluctuate as much as 25 percentage points – even if everyone invested in an identical target-date fund.

• An alternative is to guarantee a fixed return, but this return will almost always be lower than that under a target-date fund, and guarantees are not costless.