A Life Course Approach to Understanding Poverty Among Older American Adults

A relatively new strategy for studying the prevalence of poverty in America is to analyze it as a potential life course event. This approach is used in order to examine the likelihood of both income and asset poverty for individuals between the ages of 60 and 90. Nearly half of all elderly Americans will encounter at least 1 year of poverty or near poverty across these ages. In addition, 58% of those between the ages of 60 and 84 will at some point fail to have enough liquid assets to allow them to weather an unanticipated expense or downturn in income. The policy and practice implications of these findings are discussed.