The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) has some interesting numbers regarding retirement:

* Less than half of Americans have planned for retirement.

* Americans reaching age 65 can expect to live into their early 80s.

* After you retire, experts say you will need at least 70% of your preretirement income each year to sustain your current lifestyle. (Other experts say it will take even more, because retirees’longer life spans will give inflation more time to gnaw at their nest eggs.)

* Eighty percent of baby boomers (those born from 1946 to 1964) say they intend to work after retirement.

* In the late 1990s, the federal government reported that 80% of elderly Americans relied on Social Security as their main source of retirement income. In the 21st century, no reasonable retirement plan can depend on Sociai Security payments as a primary income source.

What these numbers say is that retirement is little fun without money. It’s never too early to start retirement planning, don’t expect to rely on Social Security, and in a growing number of cases it may make sense to consider the option of a reverse mortgage.

For the full report, go to:

http://buy.cuna.org/download/pers_fin_retirement.pdf

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Reverse Mortgage . 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.