Reverse Mortgage Guide

The Pension Rights Center has come out with tips for keeping track of pension dollars.Pensions are important to seniors because along with retirement accounts, investments and Social Security payments, pensions can be an important source of retirement cash. The catch is that pension payments may not be assured when companies go bust or insufficient dollars have been set aside for retirees.

“Each year,” says the PRC, it “gets calls and e-mails from retirees asking for help. Many are seeking a pension plan that was “lost” because their former company moved or merged. We also hear from workers who need help proving that they worked long enough to qualify for benefits. Other people come to us because their pension payments are less than the amounts they thought they had earned.”

The time to avoid these problems is now, before you need to claim pension dollars. You must have your paperwork right — and everything does need to be on paper.

For those thinking about reverse mortgages, the availability of pension money can be a big issue. If you have assured and certain pension benefits then a reverse mortgage may be unnecessary.

The problem is that relatively few people have pensions today — and theÂtypical pension tendsÂto be modest.

The PRC says that “half of all households with 401(k) and other defined contribution plans have less than $28,000 in their accounts? These shockingly low numbers come from the most recent Survey of Consumer Finances. Among households headed by people age 55 - 64, account balances are higher at an average of $61,000, but unless these households have a pension, their 401(k) savings may not provide them with adequate income in retirement.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 3:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.