As an advisor who deals primarily with high-net-worth individuals and couples, you’ve come to understand the many ways in which using housing wealth can help your clients preserve and grow their investment assets, avoiding wealth depletion through taxation or ill-timed withdrawals. Ironically, a recent conference breakout session on life settlements reminded you of the early – and still very valid – concept of reverse mortgages as tactics “of last resort. The presenter cited a chapter from The Wall Street Journal Complete Personal Finance Guidebook, in which author Jeff D. Opdyke acknowledges that, “People often get to a point in retirement where their income doesn’t meet their financial means.”
While your own career has been devoted to helping clients, through good planning and investment diversification, prepare for a financially secure retirement, treating both their housing wealth and their insurance policies as wealth enhancement and wealth protection tools, the breakout speaker and the Opdyke remarks called your attention to insurance and housing assets as basic support resources when life doesn’t work out as planned.
“There are two potential assets that retirees often overlook,” Opdyke writes – a home and a life insurance policy. “Both can provide a substantial income,” he points out, and both allow retirees to raise money for retirement expenses they might otherwise have a hard time covering or might have to ask their children to help them pay for.” What’s more, Opdyke points out, while life settlements involve selling one’s policy to investors, who become the beneficiaries upon the death of the insured, reverse mortgages do not involve ceding ownership of one’s property.
It’s interesting that, as James Burton observes in Wealth Professional Canada, “Reverse mortgages don’t immediately resonate with financial advisors because they are perceived to be reserved for a marketplace rooted in need.” In your case, having viewed reverse mortgages as tool for high-net worth investors, the breakout session you attended served as a reminder that reverse mortgages can be valuable tools at both ends of the spectrum.
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Readers, if you’d like to see what you might qualify for with a reverse mortgage in Indiana, or to download your Reverse Mortgage Guide Click Here(and scroll down).