Abandoned Retirement Savings

Abstract

Retirement savings abandonment is a rising concern connected to defined contribution systems and default enrollment. We use tax data on Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to establish that in 2017, 2.7% of 72.5 year-old account-holders in total abandoned $790 million; the median abandoned account held $5,400. Nearly all of these funds remain with plans and are not sent to state unclaimed property. Regression discontinuity estimates show that abandonment is 10 times higher in automatic rollover IRAs, a type of default account. We nest our findings in a model of retirement savings featuring forgetting to derive implications for passive and active savers.