So you’ve noticed some changes in your thinking; you often misplace your keys or have trouble coming up with the right word in conversations. But how do you know when these changes are a normal part of getting older or if they might be pointing to a health problem such as dementia? How the Brain…

Read More

Many American households will face a significant retirement financing gap unless they save more, invest more efficiently, retire later, and/or distribute their retirement assets more efficiently. Yet the pain of such difficult behavioral changes might be mitigated by better use of an asset that almost 80 percent of retirees have: the family home. The Reverse…

Read More

Move your body every day to guard against type 2 diabetes. That’s the upshot of a new study that analyzed Fitbit data and type 2 diabetes rates from participants in a nationwide research program, reporting that women who logged more steps each day had a lower risk of diabetes. “We investigated the relationship between physical…

Read More

Ask most people about the biggest obstacle to buying a home, and hands down, they’ll say it’s scraping together enough money for a down payment and closing costs. But understand a key point: This is not a separate and distinct issue from landing a mortgage. Lenders, after all, like to see clients lay down a…

Read More

Homeowners with a mortgage often hear about the benefits of refinancing—to snag a lower interest rate, reduce their monthly loan payments, and tap into their home equity. The list of advantages is long and enticing. But if you’ve recently refinanced but have seen interest rates drop even further—or start creeping up—you might wonder if you…

Read More

One often overlooked tactic that seniors can employ when seeking to pay down outstanding debt in retirement is the strategic use of a reverse mortgage loan, one of several options that an older American can use when examining their finances during their post-working years. This is according to contributor Bob Sullivan and editor John Schmidt…

Read More

Remember lazy Sunday afternoons when home buyers could leisurely hop from open house to open house, partaking of wine and cheese laid out to reel in more foot traffic—the more the merrier. Much can change in a year. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, triggering a wave of lockdowns…

Read More

Based on the recent release of the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), as much as half of today’s current American households are at serious risk of not having enough resources in retirement. Some of these risks can be mitigated with financial products including reverse mortgages, but more action is needed to fix…

Read More

It’s a big question with no easy answer: Should you keep renting, or is it time to think about buying a home? One of the major benefits of being a homeowner is building equity with each mortgage payment, instead of putting money into your landlord’s pocket. But that doesn’t mean buying is always the best…

Read More