Many people talk about how the high cost of living in New Jersey will force them to move out once they near retirement, but a new report finds that may not really be the case.

(Jupiterimages, ThinkStock)
(Jupiterimages, ThinkStock)
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A survey of 4,000 baby boomers conducted by the Demand Institute finds 63 percent of boomers will stay put in their current homes, once they retire.

According to Pat O'Keefe, the director of Economic Research at Cohn Reznick, boomers are a fairly diverse group, so no one explanation for their behavior will fit. However, when it comes to retirement and what they will do, emotional and financial components come into play.

"The emotional ones being: how close will you be to family, to friends, the communities you know," he said. "And the economic go to: what's it going to cost to live elsewhere?"

O'Keefe said retirement for most baby boomers comes down to selling their home in New Jersey if they want to move to another state, but for many of them "the prices of existing homes are still well below where they were back in April of 2007.

"The prices of houses are still not back to where they were when many people bought them," he said.

O'Keefe said that means that when they begin to look at moving away from New Jersey they are faced with the fact that "they may not be able to get as much when selling their Garden state home as they would need to buy a home elsewhere."

The bottom line, he said is that there's a large number of boomers "whose financial situation both in terms of what their household net worth is and their current income stream, is significantly below what it was before the economy tanked, and their plans are much more subdued today than they were prior to 2008."

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