Consumer Financial Decision Making: Understanding Savings Accumulation and Decumulation Decisions

[...]there is a savings decumulation problem related to the complex decisions consumers reaching retirement age face of determining how and when to draw down retirement savings and pension benefits. [...]the Employee Benefit Research Institute estimates that 43% of Americans in the lowestincome quartile are expected to run short of money during their first year of retirement; and by the tenth year, an estimated 72% of them will be in this predicament (VanDerhei 2014). [...]Zhao, Soman, and Kim focus on saving accumulation and examine how visual depiction of the (converging vs. diverging) flow between overall savings goals and multiple subgoals can facilitate saving. Research in information architecture has shown, for example, that the caloric content of food can be well appreciated in terms of the amount of exercise it would take to work calories off (Bleich and Rutko w 2013; Dowray et al. 2013), and the comprehension of cars' energy efficiency can be enhanced by presenting information in terms of gallons per 100 miles instead of miles per gallon (Larrick and Soli 2008).