4 Reasons Boomers Need Bigger Nest Eggs than Their Parents

People often ask how baby boomers compare with their parents in terms of being prepared for retirement. The easiest way to answer that question is to look at the ratio of wealth to income from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the Federal Reserve’s comprehensive survey of household wealth in the United States. The notion is that the wealth-to-income ratio is a good proxy for the extent to which people can replace their pre-retirement earnings in retirement. From 1983 through 2007, the period during which the surveys were conducted, the ratio of wealth to income has remained virtually unchanged at any given age. That is, the lines are roughly on top of one another.