March-April 2021

affected by this recession,” Munnell says. “It is lower-paid people and younger people who have borne the brunt.” The demographic most hurt by the pandemic has been working women with children who had to drop out of the labor force to take care of children at home, says Ramsey Alwin, president and CEO of the National Council on Aging (NCOA), adding that women traditionally put their children, families and aging parents before themselves. That pattern accelerated during the pandemic, as schools closed, and aging parents might have needed more help. “As generous and as giving as this is, putting everyone else first comes at a cost,” says Alwin, who spoke during NRMLA’s 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting in November. Munnell points out that women who left the work- force during the crisis lost income but also have not been contributing to retirement plans. They will face gaps in resumes and lost mentoring opportunities, which will have long-term implications for their retirement finances, as well. Otherwise, Munnell says, “COVID is not a retirement story.” “Older people are not the ones hurt financially in this recession,” Munnell adds. “Recessions are bad for every- body, but older people have not fared worse than prime age people or younger people.” Vernon agrees. “The pandemic has not changed the basic planning issues. And what I mean by that is that the vast majority of older workers, our research shows, haven’t accumulated enough savings to retire full time at age 65 with their current standard of living, so that hasn’t changed. COVID hasn’t changed the basic situation, other than it just made things more difficult.” People in their 50s and 60s losing jobs and being forced into retirement earlier than planned was occurring before the pandemic. People might need to find new jobs, and those who kept their jobs might want to consider delaying retirement until well after the pandemic ends. “Part of my advice is to find work that you enjoy doing or, at the very least is tolerable, and do it as long as you can,” Vernon says. “It’s good for your finances, it’s good for your state of mind and for your physical health.” “I like to say that nobody promised it would be easy to live 20 or 30 years in retirement, and nobody said it was a good idea to wing it,” Vernon says. “And that’s what too many people are doing: They’re winging it.” Multiple tools are available on the internet and else- where to make plans, but it is a matter of getting peo- ple to use them. The website agewellplanner.org, run by the NCOA, has various tools for improving retirement, including recommending options for income streams that include reverse mortgages. “Older homeowners with housing wealth are consid- ered more financially secure,” Alwin says. “The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how quickly unexpected events may upset many aspects of daily life,” Alwin says, adding that financial vulnerabilities are prev- alent across all incomes. “It also made Americans more conscious of their home as a safe haven and the need to strengthen the ability to age in place.” Financial insecurity is a major motivation when peo- ple consider a HECM, Alwin adds. Her agency will coun- sel people on the right situations to use home equity “to keep small issues from becoming big problems.” “Everyone is financially fragile,” she says. “Adequate cash flow is critical when that rainy day arrives, and it is almost inevitable that it will.” REVERSE MORTGAGE / MARCH-APR I L 2021 23