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The tradeoff between mortgage prepayments and tax-deferred retirement savings

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Author Info
Eugene Amromin
Jennifer Huang
Clemens Sialm

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Abstract

We show that a significant number of households can perform a tax arbitrage by cutting back on their additional mortgage payments and increasing their contributions to tax- deferred accounts (TDA). Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we show that about 38% of U.S. households that are accelerating their mortgage payments instead of saving in tax-deferred accounts are making the wrong choice. For these households, reallocating their savings can yield a mean benefit of 11 to 17 cents per dollar, depending on the choice of investment assets in the TDA. ; In the aggregate, these misallocated savings are costing U.S. households as much as 1.5 billion dollars per year. Finally, we show empirically that this inefficient behavior is unlikely to be driven by liquidity considerations or other constraints, and that self-reported debt aversion and risk aversion variables explain to some extent the preference for paying off debt obligations early and hence the propensity to forgo our proposed tax arbitrage.

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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in its series Working Paper Series with number WP-06-05.

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Date of creation: 2006
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Handle: RePEc:fip:fedhwp:wp-06-05

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Keywords: Mortgage loans ; Retirement income ; Taxation;

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This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: References listed on IDEAS
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  30. Esther Duflo & Emmanuel Saez, 2002. "The Role of Information and Social Interactions in Retirement Plan Decisions: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment," NBER Working Papers 8885, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  31. Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, 2002. "Limited Asset Market Participation and the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 110(4), pages 825-853, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Geng Li & Paul A. Smith, 2008. "Borrowing from yourself: 401(k) loans and household balance sheets," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2008-42, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  2. Geng Li & Paul A. Smith, 2009. "New evidence on 401(k) borrowing and household balance sheets," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2009-19, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  3. Marcel Marekwica & Raimond Maurer, 2009. "How unobservable Bond Positions in Retirement Accounts affect Asset Allocation," Working Paper Series: Finance and Accounting 176, Department of Finance, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. [Downloadable!]
  4. Karen E. Dynan & Donald L. Kohn, 2007. "The rise in U.S. household indebtedness: causes and consequences," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2007-37, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
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