A disturbing study released by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research finds that almost half of Americans die with less than $10,000 in assets.  Not surprisingly the study has gone largely overlooked given the penchant of Americans to ignore bad news and that which might suggest the need for positive behavioral changes.

The study’s authors (James Poterba of MIT, Steven Venti of Dartmouth and David Wise of Harvard) found “a substantial fraction of persons die with virtually no financial assets…many of these households also have no housing wealth and rely almost entirely on Social Security benefits for support.”

Such low asset levels provide little capacity to pay for unanticipated events – particularly health care needs.  Not surprisingly the study found higher incidents of poverty among those in poor health.

Additional information about the study and its findings may be found here.