What do you know about reverse mortgage? That is my Dad’s question to me when I visited him at home in the country last weekend. Well, as a matter of fact, I don’t know much about this mortgage as well, but taking him to the mortgage company would be much better. I learnt that my parents are having financial problem and they plan to sell my late granny’s house not far from our house. My grandma passed for years ago and my Dad is the one who apparently should take care for it because he is the only child my Grandma had. The house is quite big and it will surely be a bad idea to sell it. That is why when there is no other choice I recommended him to get the house mortgaged. He agreed and few days later we went to get more detail explanation straightforwardly from the company.
Inside the company building, we were told by a very kind security staff to get directly to the front office where a nice looking young woman greeted us warmly. She is a customer officer in charge and she explained that reverse mortgage is offered to owners of houses at the age of 62 years and older. It is a typical national program but some private programs are opened and applied to them who wish to borrow at the lower to 59 1/2 years old. These private programs give homeowners a chance to access to their equity in form of monthly income, in the sort of cash, or a combination of both. In addition, she said that the money received by the homeowner is generally free of tax and does not cause any inconvenient effect on Social Medicare or Security benefits.
Quite a lot the information I got from her and I guessed my Dad had also gained something important in considering a reverse mortgage upon my grandma’s house. But I still did not get any idea about reverse mortgage calculator she mentioned within her explanation. She returned to the point of the reverse mortgage calculator which is a kind of system designed by the Federal Housing Administration. The system is applied to determine eligibility of senior homeowners for a reverse mortgage loan. Different from general calculators that could be found elsewhere, the system along with current programs and rates is regularly updated. This will make things easier to process and to calculate.
Slowly, my Dad looked interested in the program and he asked several more questions that I did not think it is quite crucial for me to interfere. Most of his questions were about the condition and all documents related the house. I thought I had just better listen patiently.