Last month we discussed the different stages at which American cities are going gray . But this rising tide, dubbed the Silver Tsunami by Mary Finn Maples, professor of Counseling and Educational Psychology at the University of Nevada/Reno, is far different than going gray in previous generations. Today it’s something to be celebrated, as Vicki Topaz demonstrates with her black and white portraits of women wearing silver hair with grace. Silver, according to color psychology, causes us to think cool, scientific, prestigious, and feminine. Gray, meanwhile, evokes the timeless, practical, solid, expectant. Clearly, we’re winners either way as we gray.

The real question is, how are seniors using their later years? Some believe in making positive change at any age: 86-year-old personal growth paragon Louise Hay launched Hay House , now a global publishing empire, when she was 60. She is known for saying, “the point of power is always in the present moment,” and exemplifies her recent : “You will never be younger than you are today. So get started on making your dreams come true.”

Hay is clearly someone who would make an excellent reverse mortgage prospect, were she not already as financially successful as she is in every other realm through her dedication to personal growth — a path that, as she recounts in her many books, she only stepped onto in midlife.

Aging remains a slippery slope, even as many embrace it. Author Alix Kates Shulman recounts an amusing story of sharing mango margaritas with a new friend, a poet not yet fifty, who was “stunned to discover she’d been trading secrets with a seventy-year-old” — even as Shulman admits she used to marvel at the perspicacity of friends who were more than a decade older than she, when she was in her forties, fifties and sixties.

What does this mean for reverse mortgage specialists? Perceptions of aging are shifting as fluidly as the housing market and HECM rules, so remaining in a silver state of mind will enable you to approach the continually evolving reverse mortgage scene with the timeless, cool, and balanced perspective needed to make you successful in this market, with your target market.