Retirement Might Be Worse Than We Think

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PlanSponsor covered the release of the BGI research study “The Future Shock of Retirement,” co-authored by Scanlan with Jonathan Cohen and Matthew O’Hara. The article summarizes the study’s core findings: that a significant share of middle-income American households are counting on Social Security and home equity as retirement assets in ways that overstate their security and liquidity.

The coverage focuses on the study’s policy implications and its challenge to the conventional wisdom that most Americans are reasonably well-positioned for retirement. Scanlan is quoted on the behavioral dimension of the problem — the tendency to treat home equity as a reliable source of retirement income — and on the need for responses at both the institutional and individual level.