especially if you have Fred Thompson making commercials for them. They are simply a home equity loan where you bear all the costs for selling the house when the time comes and the bank gets all the interest it could charge in all those years. Actually you are borrowing that money and paying interest on it. And it adds up over years.

Homes have appreciated over the years at between 4 and 5 percent annually. Your Reverse Mortgage Loan is at 3.5 percent. You make no payments unless you wish and when you sell your home you pay off the mortgage which has been accumulating interest over the years. The difference being the interest on your loan is compounded whereas the appreciation on your home is not. It still is a good deal for elderly people that have big payments. It eliminates all payments and lets people live off the equity in their home.. It is a good deal for all involved imo.

you have a much smaller portion of the house that is owned by you. All of the rest belongs to the bank. Less money for you to have for the nursing home care. Anyone who cannot afford their big mortgage payments is not going to have large savings elsewhere to tide them over the last few years when they cannot take care of themselves. Are you saying they will move in with their children at that time? Because they will not be able to afford anything else. My aunt and father in law, when they became too old to live on their own, had to pay 3,000 dollars a month for their nursing home/assisted living arrangements. Can a person who cannot afford their mortgage payment on the house afford that? A paid off house is a nice big bank account that will tide them over in their later years but a house with a reverse mortgage will just give all that money to the bank. Ask yourself why do people need a reverse mortgage in the first place??

A reverse mortgage is still only a mortgage...Sometimes people get strapped when their entire retirement is going to pay their current mortgage and other payments. The Reverse mortgage frees them up so they no longer have to make any payments at all, and their entire income is able to be used in any manner they please. I am sure they know when they go to sell their house they will have to pay off their mortgage. Hopefully their house will have gone up in value at a good rate and they either come out even or down just a little and still were able to live a few years with no financial worries.

over the years my husband and I have had to sell houses three times when it was NOT a good year to sell a house. One house we held a second mortgage on for years and then the buyers just stopped paying anything. another time we rented the place out, still can't sell it.( the area has had bad economy for years) another time we took a loss on the place. Present home, we lost about 100 thousand in value and it hasn't come back in the last 7 years. One reason, a lot of building is going on all around and driving values down all over the area. With so many banks encouraging people to take out home equity loans, chances are they may not have anything coming or it might be a bad year to sell a house. Expecting a house to go up in value is a risky business.

using history as a guide, they actually do. The average appreciation of home values is between four and five percent, and that is standard throughout the USA. Granted there are years where that rule does not hold true, but mostly it does. Also there are years where your home value goes up by over ten percent..On a personal note, my home has doubled in value every ten years for the last fifty years..

any house that has a family that needs a reverse mortgage because the owners cannot pay their regular mortgage is in a neighborhood that probably will not double in any decade. We have newly built neighborhoods nearby where the houses are 400-500 thousand. Those houses are selling fine, in our neighborhood, just 2-3 blocks away, we have had a high rate of foreclosures. Average them out and things are just fine. And apparently, I have bought and sold more houses in more states in the last 40+ years than you have.

Most of those people are on fixed incomes and would like to spend their golden years with a little more money in their pockets. They would like to be able to visit their grand kids and their great grand kids and be able to spend a little on them.. That is often difficult to do on a fixed income, especially if you are saddled with high bills/payments..They want to enjoy their retirement and this is one way that helps them do that..

the idea is to pay off your house etc before you hit 65.

Sounds like a Reverse Mortgage may not be for you. Not everyone fits your life plan for whatever reasons. Yes it would be nice to have one's house paid off by the time they reach sixty five or any age for that matter but the reality is that not everyone can do that. There are many reason people may have had to mortgage their homes. Medical reasons or sending children through school, or many other reasons and a lot of folks would like to get out from underneath those mortgages. This is one way they can do that.

The only question is whether the jebus-wheezers or the phony PACs are the reichwing's biggest scam artists.

Conservatism is dedicated one thing and one thing only: the concentration of wealth into the fewest possible hands. Scamming is the design rather than a side effect.

The further right conservative activists are, the more likely they're behind some sort of theft by deception. That's my opinion.

god help us if get a good bang 4 the buck