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Elena Bastida, Florida International University
Tibebe Assefa, University of Texas Pan American
Carlos Barreto Beck, Texas A & M University
Gokce Soydemir, California State University, Stanislaus
While much has been written about retirement planning for the US older population, most of this literature has concentrated on retirement planning and financial well being among older whites. Lately, this topic has been investigated for older African Americans, yet there is a significant dearth in the literature that explores retirement planning and expected financial well being among older Mexican Americans, the largest Hispanic origin group in the United States.
Results presented here employ four waves of the Border Epidemiologic Study of Aging (BESA) to explore self reported expectations of financial well being at retirement. We further investigate this question by formulating and testing a construct on the expectation of preserving their current lifestyle upon retirement.
The BESA is a four wave prospective study of 1299 Mexican Americans randomly selected from three counties along the US Mexico Border when weighed, the sample represents approximately 300,000 middle age and older Mexican Americans residing in the region. After categorizing cohorts by country of birth, those respondents who report low income and are US born are more likely to expect Social Security payments upon retirement than the Mexican born. While the US born population who report better health and more years of education expect pension and annuities upon retirement, the Mexican born cohorts do not share such expectation. In sum, among the Mexican American middle age population, those who are native born expect to maintain their current lifestyle upon retirement while those who are born in Mexico do not share this expectation. Other findings of interest are also reported.