Procrastination in personal finance: Implications for estate planning and retirement satisfaction
Rohan Shah and Anita Mukherjee
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Mar 2026
Despite concerns that many older adults delay essential financial decisions, there is limited population-level evidence linking measured procrastination to late-life behavior. Using the first nationwide procrastination module in the Health and Retirement Study, we show that individuals with higher procrastination scores are significantly less likely to engage in core estate-planning tasks. Procrastinators are about nine percentage points less likely to have a will or trust and report lower retirement satisfaction, controlling for demographics, income, and region. We validate the behavioral measure by showing that procrastinators report worse health and exhibit some riskier behaviors, consistent with theoretical predictions. Together, these results highlight procrastination as a meaningful behavioral constraint that shapes financial and health outcomes at older ages.