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Try It NOWCategory: Financial and taxes in retirement
Thousands of retirees are having to postpone their planned moves to retirement communities – a different kind of housing crunch victim. Many have selected the active adult community or CCRC of their dreams, only to find a big catch – they can’t sell their primary residence, which is how they…
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Category: Retirement Real Estate
May 30 -- For as complicated a question this is, it is amazing how strong the opinions are. The one thing that is clear is hindsight - if you lived in the markets hardest hit by the housing crisis over the last 2 years (Phoenix, Las Vegas, South Florida, and parts of California), renting would have been the superior option. Your living costs would have been lower, and you wouldn't have lost any capital.
Articles in the New York Times and Seekingalpha.com explored the issue this week. The Times article on "Committed Renter Decides to Buy" used the concept of rent/purchase ratio to try to get a handle on the question. The ratio is basically the price of a typical house divided by the annual rent - and the higher the number the more you should consider renting.
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Category: Active adult communities
About 60 million Americans live in buildings controlled by home owners associations (HOAs), according to the Community Association Institute. Now, as the real estate crunch moves into a new phase with more strapped owners who can't make their mortgage or maintenance payments, HOAs are being forced to foreclose to protect their interests.
The problem is worse in older condominium associations, especially those that have been poorly run. Suddenly facing large maintenance bills some HOAs have to send out hefty assessment notices, but unfortunately many owners are not in a position to pay.
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Category: Active adult communities
Developers of active adult and over 50 communities are fighting back against the real estate slowdown. Their imaginations have been working overtime to come with new and exciting incentives to bring prospective buyers back into their communities. Obviously, lowering prices is a tactic used by most. Indeed the average price of new units sold at Toll Brothers and other builders is down significantly. But many developers are also focusing on the key problem facing buyers of active adult communities – they can’t buy a new home because they can’t sell their old one. Check out some of the ideas we have heard about in the last few weeks:
Buy 1, Get 1 Free
We’re not kidding, a California builder, Michael Crewes Development, is actually offering this deal. Buy one house, get a 2,000 sq.ft. cityscape row home worth $400,000 for free. So what about the house you have to buy?
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
While some might think this list is primarily for eggheads, consider for a moment the popularity of college towns for retirement. Increasingly retirees want to retire to a place where they can keep their brain engaged. This list from U.S. News & Word Report gives you some "brainy" places to consider.
Here are U.S. News' brainiest places to retire:
* Ann Arbor, MI
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Category: Eldercare
June 24, 2008 -- Baby boomers fortunate enough to still have living parents gained a new resource today, BestAssistedLiving.com. This new online resource can help adult children find the best assisted living, eldercare, independent living, CCRC, and nursing home facilities for their loved ones. The website is a sister site to Topretirements.com, serves a similar audience, and has a site structure that will be very familiar to visitors of that popular online retirement community resource.
As a welcome to the site visitors can download a useful free eBook, "The Practical Guide to Selecting Eldercare Facilities". This new assisted living resource features a variety of helps for children of elders, as well as seniors who are looking for the best assisted living and retirement home resources.
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Category: Retirement Real Estate
June 27 -- Identifying the bottom of a real estate cycle is a trick that is just about impossible to master. We at Topretirements have been exploring this question for over a year now, wondering if it is finally the right time to buy into a retirement community or active adult community. Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer in sight. Today's New York Times article, "Retirees Find the Time May Be Right to Buy", examined this question, profiling the experiences several retirees had as they explored the retirement community real estate market.
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