HECM Archives - Jerry Golden on Retirement

IRA & Your Home Together Make for Better Retirement Plan

November 7, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: HECM, Income annuities, ira2income, Jerry Golden, Retirement Planning

While most retired families own an IRA and a home, very few are considering how they could work together in a plan for retirement income.

Sometimes, combinations are dramatically better than stand-alone inventions.

Before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he realized the plastic screen on his prototype would be prone to scratching and breaking. He approached Corning and asked for superstrong glass. Corning created Gorilla Glass to meet Jobs’ specs, and the result was a consumer product that took over the world.

A Different Way to Approach Your Mortgage in Retirement

August 21, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Forward vs Reverse mortgage, healthcare needs in retirement, HECM, HomeEquity2Income, Income annuities

Conventional wisdom says don’t carry any mortgage into retirement, and if you can manage that debt-free feat, good for you. But there are other options.

The concept that retirees should pay off their mortgage stems from a combination of historical economic conditions, cultural values surrounding homeownership and debt, and financial planning principles aimed at ensuring security and peace of mind in retirement. This idea has been passed down through generations, although individual circumstances today may lead to different approaches.

Nearly 40% of retirees, for instance, have a mortgage. And the average mortgage balance is over $100,000, which translates to average annual mortgage payments of $10,000 that will last at least 12 years or more.

That doesn’t mean retirement plans are doomed to fail if they include a mortgage. Rather, we think that in designing your plan for retirement, you ought to consider the equity in your home, and then decide whether a mortgage, either existing or new, belongs in your plan.

Home-Based Planning to Address Long-Term Care Costs

July 30, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: HECM, income, Legacy, Liquidity, Long-term care costs, QLAC

Traditional planning for the cost of long-term care (LTC) doesn’t reflect the realities of what the costs are and where they’ll be paid from.

We’re living longer in retirement, and more of us want to age in place rather than sell the family home. A recent policy paper by AARP listed the goals of the age-in-place population:

Ensure access to affordable, high-quality long-term services and supports (LTSS) that maximizes the dignity, independence, and protection of older adults
Create age-friendly, livable communities that enable people to age in place, and continue as engaged members of their communities
Support family caregivers
Provide ample opportunities to generate, save, and preserve financial resources

Those goals all seem reasonable and smart. Our focus is around # 4 — and about planning to preserve resources while meeting retiree objectives.

Let’s start with costs.

Is Your Retirement Solution Hiding in Plain Sight?

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: Annuities, HECM, HomeEquity2Income, QLAC

Here’s how to use your home equity in combination with an annuity contract to produce late-in-life income.

Editor’s note: The earlier article How Your Home Can Fill Gaps in Your Retirement Plan discussed the “why” of incorporating the equity in your home in your plan for retirement income. This article discusses the “how.”

In retirement, your home means something more than it did while you were raising kids, getting promotions at work, and dreaming about how the future might unfold.Now, it can provide the opportunity that helps you realize your future in retirement — financially at least.

For most of us, our house carries much more equity than it did when we were just starting out. Home prices have more than doubled in the past 20 years. How to use that equity to benefit you and your family is a key retirement question that your home can answer. But as you will see, it may work better when combined with an annuity contract that produces late-in-life income.

How Your Home Can Fill Gaps in Your Retirement Plan

June 9, 2024 By Jerry Golden in Annuity Tags: HECM, HomeEquity2Income, Income annuity, QLAC, Retirement gaps

If you have gaps in your plan for retirement income, you might consider adding the value of your home to your planning.

Most retirement planning methods have ignored what for some retirees is their largest single asset — their home. That means the plan may fail to deliver on one or more of the five things retirees want:

Don’t run out of money
Grow income each year
Leave a meaningful legacy for kids and grandkids
Increase spendable income by reducing taxes
Build up a source of liquidity for unplanned or unfunded expenses

With the addition of the new HomeEquity2Income (H2I) program described in this article, Go2Income now covers over 90% of all retiree asset classes. H2I uses the equity in your primary residence to fill in the gaps in your plan that otherwise might require insurance that you don’t qualify for, higher-risk investments, or more aggressive assumptions as to yields and returns in your plan.Starting with this article and continuing over the next month or so, we’ll cover the why, what, and how of the HomeEquity2Income program.

First, the “why” of H2I.