As opposed to 62 or 50? We’ve got a lot of them around here and they’re all 55+ and never anything else. Is there a regulation that says it’s no longer discrimination to not sell/rent to you if you’re not that age?
There’s a carve-out in the federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination based on age and other things, that allows for 55-and-older retirement communities. So you can’t do younger and I assume there’s no incentive to do older and restrict your clientele.
So that pushes it back a layer. How did the Feds arrive at 55?
How did they arrive at residential real estate being depreciated over 27.5 years, and nonresidential real estate being depreciated over 39 years? My best guess is compromise between different people that wanted different numbers.
The ones I’ve seen only require one spouse to be 55+, so if Studly McAlmostRetired has a 20 year old trophy wife, all kinds of risqué hilarity may ensue.
Also, 55+ gives them 5 more years of potential customers.
Any business would like that.
The Fair Housing Act was made law in 1968. (See link below). We’ve had occasional threads about how people in previous generations looked much older at a given age than people in the last 20 years or so. It used to be that a 55-year-old was considered an old person.
55 is a good length for the traditional “30 years and you retire with a full pension” work life that used to be fairly common (and now has nearly disappeared.) 55 is also a point where many parents are finally seeing their children move out, and thus are more likely to want to downsize and look for a new place.
Like glowaks said, it’s a good compromise.
This is it.
I don’t know about the USA in general, but in Canada many retirement plans have features like “55 and out”, “rule of 80” (age and years of service add up to 80), or “30 and out”. Except Canada Pension Plan, which you can start early at 60. Many of these concepts are borrowed from the USA; we just haven’t completely gotten rid of them, although defined benefit pension plans in the private sector are disappearing here like in the USA.
So there was a decent-sized cohort of elders (once upon a time) who could and did retire well before 65. Presumably someone taking that plunge would also be well off, so a desirable customer. I assume the carve-out for 55-plus was based on this possibility of retirement at 55. Most likely as part of their retirement process, if someone is planning to move house and do some form or real estate deal, they do it then and not 10 years into retirement. People establishing their retirement housing often would prefer a setting where they did not have to yell at kids to get off their lawn, or deal with noisy families or worse, disrespectful drunken vandalizing teenagers - hence the age limit.
I sincerely doubt anyone well heeled enough to afford a trophy wife is going to want to live in a retirement community and, were I a trophy wife, I certainly wouldn’t want to do so! I need action and a social life, not gardening and golf.
I always thought that both people had to be 55+, and that that age was chosen because the woman was almost surely past child-bearing age, thus eliminating the risk of introducing kids to the community.
I’m not sure how many pensions ever really were “work 30 years and you can retire” rather than the much more common “if you have worked 30 years, you can collect your pension at 55 rather than the normal age of 6X”. But either way , 55 is pretty much the lower limit of when people actually retire. There are some pensions that can be collected at 20 or 25 or 30 years regardless of age , but people don’t usually actually retire in their 30s or 40s because they can collect that pension - they nearly always get another full-time job.
Yes, some versions I’ve heard of refer to a pension “Rule of 85” instead of 80. The few companies that used to have 30-and-out tended to be physical labour jobs, much like the military; if you worked your butt off physically from 18 to 48, along with the working class lifestyle that often included heavy drinking, odds are you weren’t lasting long past 65. I worked once where the union had that provision, so it was applied to the (non-union) office workers too. But, that was several decades ago. (I recall someone saying when they went to direct deposit pay in the late 60’s, a lot of those workers had to explain to their wives why the pay was now so much higher, when they didn’t have their pay in pocket stopping at the bar on the way home.)
Decades of government economic measures and Wall Street shenanigans have conspired to make it difficult keeping a defined benefit plan solvent. Not to mention, corporate executives have discovered that when in doubt, declare bankruptcy and abrogate the pension obligations. (Without, of course, nullifying executive pay rates)
One place that you still may see the Rule of 85 is in public employee retirement systems. Based on my wife being a teacher, I know that in our state, teachers and other public employees can retire with full pension starting at age 55, if their age plus their years of service total 85. A quick bit of Googling shows that this seems to be true in at least a few other states as well.
Some of them may not exactly be a “rule of 85” - with my state government pension I could retire without any reduction in my benefit if I had 30 years and was 55 years old. Kind of looks like a rule of 85 - but if I had 32 years at 53, I couldn’t retire (55 was the minimum age) and if I had 29 years at 56 the benefit would be reduced. (Reduction for retiring before 62 unless you had at least 30 years) By a lot - at 56 with 29.5 years , I would have lost over $10k a year over what I would have gotten six months later.
The first part of that is true of my state as well; it starts at age 55, as I said. The second part is different. Where we live, once you reach 55, you can take full retirement, as long as your age plus your years of service equal 85 or more. So a 56-year-old with 29 years of service would get the full pension.
“Rule of 85” is what they actually call it on the state’s website, whether or not it meets the strict requirements. It’s true that there is the caveat that if you’re 54, and have been working for 31 years, you can’t retire yet, even though you’ve got a total of 85.
These plans definitely favor those who found a job young and stayed with it instead of getting a new job every X years.
That’s because in the post World War II era (remember, the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968) getting a job in something like manufacturing and keeping it for life was part of the American Dream.
I haven’t done an exhaustive search but the ones I’ve seen say one spouse must be at least 55 and the other 45.
You’re only limited by your physical ability and your own state of mind. We have ample cash and moved to this retirement community a few months ago. It’s a matter of practicality (which I won’t go into), not of giving up on life.