The Housing Crisis - "Older Americans are getting whacked twice,"

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At 94, Sylvia Merlin is stuck.

MSN reports in it's article, Seniors crushed by housing crisis, the widow can't sell her home or fall back on her investments. She's lost $200,000 in the stock market since the beginning of 2008, she says. Like a growing number of seniors, she's been unable to move into the retirement community she had planned to because of the shattered housing market and her dwindling retirement portfolio.

And Merlin is running out of time: Her health is deteriorating, and her home is increasingly unlivable.
94 and nowhere to go

"Older Americans are getting whacked twice," says Thomas Shapiro, the director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University, and the co-author of a study titled "Living Longer on Less." "Home equity, which is their largest reservoir of wealth and their largest expense, has taken a tremendous hit. Portfolios have taken the same hit as everyone else, but seniors don't have the same length of time to dig themselves out."

Elderly Americans with fixed incomes are increasingly being compelled to make seemingly impossible decisions, Shapiro says, such as choosing between paying their housing bills or their medical costs.

More than 54% of all senior households "do not have sufficient financial resources to meet median projected expenses based on their current financial net worth, projected Social Security and pension incomes," according to the Brandeis study.

Some seniors are moving in with their children because they can't pay all the bills. Census reports show multigenerational families are on the rise in part, experts say, because of the housing and larger economic crisis. An estimated 3.6 million parents (not all of them elderly) live with their adult children, according to 2007 census data, up from 2.3 million in 2000, an increase of 57%. In those households, the number of parents 65 and older was up 62%.

Others are turning to reverse mortgages, loans available for seniors 62 and older that allow them to get cash based on the value of their home with no monthly mortgage payments. Such a loan is repaid out of proceeds from the eventual sale of the home or from the borrower's estate after his or her death. More HERE