A recent study by the American Association of Retired People (AARP) revealed that the housing market’s foreclosure crisis has not left even older homeowners unscathed.

The study, conducted by the AARP’s Public Policy Institute found that roughly 684,000 homeowners age 50 or older were delinquent on their mortgage during the last half of 2007, with some 50,000 already in some stage of foreclosure.

 ”The public perception is that older Americans are financially secure in their homes,” said Susan Reinhard, director of the Public Policy Institute. “But the reality is that while many are in fact secure, hundreds of thousands of others are not and face unsettling uncertainty over their futures as homeowners.

“Older Americans depend on their homes both for shelter and as a retirement asset,” she added. “Losing a home jeopardizes long-term financial security, with limited time to recover.”

The over-50 crowd represented about 28 percent of all foreclosures and delinquencies nationwide, according to the study. And of all the age 50-plus people in the survey, 24 percent of them were behind on their home loan payments or in foreclosure. While the flip side indicates that the majority of seniors are still making their payments, there is still a significant portion of the population that are facing financial crisis with only a few years left before retirement.

One important, but unsurprising statistic of the study is that older homeowners with subprime mortgage loans (usually adjustable rate mortgages or ARMs) were 17 times more likely to be in foreclosure than their counterparts with prime or good credit loans.

As many Americans facing retirement lose their homes or have trouble keeping up with the payments, Reinhard suggested that the mortgage lending business needs to change. Referring to complex home loan contracts and aggressive loan officers and brokers, she said, “the mortgage environment is very complicated. We need more simplified mortgage contract language that people can understand.”

The AARP study included data from Experian credit reports from over 2.5 million people, including 1 million age 50 and older.