I Love Palm Beach
I Love Palm Beach
Busting the Myths: Reverse Mortgages
Say goodbye to misconceptions about reverse mortgages as we welcome Mike Rabon, an expert who knows this financial instrument like the back of his hand. Our conversation with Mike promises to clear the fog around reverse mortgages, especially for those over the age of 62, while also shedding light on the mortgage insurance policy that it involves. We also delve into the specifics of reverse mortgages, including how an amortization table can answer crucial questions for homeowners.
Ever wondered about the loan-to-value for an FHA loan? Or how a line of credit can become a safety net for those needing more income? Mike has got you covered. He also discusses the tax implications of a reverse mortgage and how it could potentially save you from dipping into your IRAs or other tax consequential accounts. Our conversation with Mike is not just about figures and percentages; it's a deep dive into how seniors can redefine their financial independence with a tool that's often misunderstood.
Hello, how are you Get? How are you?
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Speaker 1:Oh, this is nice. We might have to do this.
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Speaker 2:We're recording on the tree, hi everybody.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to, I look long beach Today.
Speaker 2:Of course, we have Stephanie and Mike Raven. Did I say that, right? I probably you did. Okay, right, raven? I want to say it's a different way. And he is here, we're going to do another real estate edition to talk to us about the feared reverse mortgage, and I think we're going to do that. We're going to do that, we're going to do that, we're going to do the feared reverse mortgage and I tell people time and time again reverse mortgage is a huge asset and Mike is here to you know explain the intricacies, the things that are false information that people think, and the reasons why you should consider this when you're moving to Palm beach, or maybe upgrading, or maybe you just want to live a little better and have a little better experience.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. Thanks again for joining us. Mike, why don't you give us a little bit of your background and how you got into the mortgage?
Speaker 3:industry to begin with. Okay, thanks, thanks so much, stephanie, rebecca I, and thanks so much for having me here today. I, as you can tell, once I start talking about this Product, I can't stop and my wife tells me we're going out tonight If I hear the word reverse mortgage out of your mouth. But people ask because everyone is curious, regardless of their feeling about their assumption about this product. They're curious and they want to know. And I enjoy sharing All of the good things about it Because in the end everyone says to me this sounds too good to be true, and they know it's. It's not too good to be true, but it's too good to be free. There is a mortgage insurance policy that goes with it, but it is easy to explain. And once we're done explaining, people say, okay, that's fine, where was this good to go?
Speaker 3:I got into mortgages from after a full 25 year career with AT&T and other telecom companies because I got too old for that space. My boss, travis Stevenson, talked me into getting my license for Lending and he said would you head up our reverse mortgage group? And I said, why? Because I'm old? And he said, well, kind of, but I have to say being a senior In working with seniors is a big advantage. It helps me a lot, gives me credibility with them.
Speaker 3:But the reasons why you would want to do a reverse mortgage is once you're over 62, you may have a lot of equity and if you're in a home, that is your rest of life home. And that's one of my first questions for all borrowers Is this your rest of life home? If they say yes to that Answer, I'd say how? How are you going to use the equity that you have in this home that you worked so hard for your life to Build? And they don't know, you know. Or they say, oh, I'm just gonna leave it for the kids. And we, when we suggest that they pull some of that equity out through you, the use of the mortgage, they're concerned in that question. They're fearing that they're. It's gonna be a loss of Equity for the kids and all of that's not true. I don't know how far you want me to go into this. I'll start off, talk for an hour.
Speaker 3:So the two, the two, what I'm running into? Just real-life examples. Seniors, and all of you who are seniors who are listening, know that you have created baggage over the years. You have Then good to your kids. You've done what you can and many cases don't have a lot of savings, but you do have a lot of equity. So the reverse mortgage is.
Speaker 3:The purpose of it is to allow seniors to activate some of that equity and Use it in your senior years. The nice thing about it is, once you activate, give a good example. It's that many, many seniors are doing now. They've had fully paid for homes and they're Activate some of that equity. In that equity that they activate, it can be anywhere from, you know, 3050,000 to. I was doing one just yesterday for over 300,000. That's money that's available for them to use, you know, and I suggest if you don't need the money right now, don't use it. Just leave it in the, in the pot, more or less the line of credit. It's called because while it sits in the line of credit is going to grow at the interest rate of the loan and compound.
Speaker 1:This is all great, but let's take a step back, because not everyone knows what a you know reverse mortgage is to begin with. So I know you're going straight Into some of the intricacies of it, but can you just give us a quick level definition of what exactly reverse mortgage is? You know it's an FHA loan, whatever. And then who qualifies for it first?
Speaker 3:Now that's a good that's really good points. The. It is just a mortgage. You know the advertising that you see the Tom Selleck has for one of the big lenders, a AG, is absolutely accurate. It's just a mortgage and it just has different guidelines for repaying it.
Speaker 3:Payments are optional. So you're in this loan, fha, based on your age and the value of your home and what's happening with the Treasury and the interest rates, will tell you. Here's how much you can borrow anywhere from 35% to about 75%. Once you take you with, that money is what you pay off the closing costs with and that's what the mortgage is made of. Whatever it costs you to set up the loan and that's, you know, anywhere from, you know, 15 to $20,000. So the payments on these loans are optional. So you can make a payment or not make a payment. It's up to you. Nobody cares whether you make a payment. The difference in this loan versus a conventional is, if you do make the payment, it's fully recoverable and you can take it back out. And go into more details on that. You skip the wrong thing, though.
Speaker 1:What's the age, and then what happens? That's a good point.
Speaker 3:The minimum age is 62 years old and 62 years old and there's a lot of people in this industry say that if people under 62 Could do this loan, they would all do it, because Payments aren't required and if you don't make a payment, nobody's gonna come after you. You know you. Just it's repaid by the house. It's called a non-recourse loan. So there's no recourse on a human being. There's no, no relatives or or heirs that are responsible to repay the loan. The house repays the loan when you move out Permanently, and that's either horizontal or vertical. You know we're talking to old people, so they know what I'm talking about. So they, once the loan is is repaid by the home. The extra, the leftover equity, goes to the heirs, or the heirs can pay off the loan and keep the house if they want. That's not common.
Speaker 2:That's the biggest Complaint I hear from people and why they don't want to use it. They're like, well, what am I gonna leave my kids Right all the way? Florida prices are increasing. There's still plenty to love.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I love that my favorite part of a proposal when I give it to people is to go to this big table it's the you the call the amortization table and go out and I asked, I asked this question when do you think you're gonna die? And that's a weird question for younger people in the room kind of freak out at that. But the people who are over of the age group that are qualified for these instantly give me an answer. You know, they, they know, and they say usually 84, 85. So go to that, that that line and go all the way to the right and it'll show you how much equity you have, based on the amount of debt that's built up over that time and the appreciation assumption of only 4%. And you know in your area appreciation is probably 10% or 12% or more. So they're shocked 100% of the time, shocked at how much money is left for the kids.
Speaker 3:And I always say and this has happened a lot if you're concerned about what you're leaving for the kids, ask them, have a conversation with your kids. I always want them involved. And the kids will always say mom and dad, do what's right for you and don't come and live with me. And they always laugh at that, but they never disagree with it. You know the kids are happy to have mom and dad use the equity that they have because they know that they need a place to live and it keeps them in their home much longer. So it's better to have in-home care than to be put into another housing situation that's going to cost a lot.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I definitely think that's something that people don't realize is, yes, they're taking out the debt on it, but that allows them to have that appreciation that they wouldn't have otherwise, because they might write out of money if they have a payment, you know and then they just pass it all together.
Speaker 3:But you know the big thing is, if they're on a fixed income they go from. A lot of them go into the senior years with a mortgage that's going to outlast their life and while they're in the senior years they put such a focus on making those payments because they're afraid of thinking about the reverse. They continue making these payments. Those payments are 80% interest. It's having to come out of the fixed income that they have. Or, even worse thing that's happened, it happens a lot they're pulling the money from IRAs, 401ks or whatever that get taxed and so you could lose part of it there. Selling it at a loss like today's market is terrible, and then most of the rest of it goes to interest. And they say and HUD and FHA are all saying why do this? You know, once you're at this age, just activate the equity. You have your home with the best part of this loan. Once it's in place, it's protected for the rest of your life. You have to do three things Pay your taxes, pay your homeowners insurance and make it your primary home. You know, if you have an HOA, you got to keep that up to an HOA and be brief. But other than that there's nothing else you need to do. The FHA says you have to keep the home up, you can't let it go into disarray, but there's no FHA police driving around checking that either. So for most seniors, once they enter this loan and I talked to them later and I've done pushing 300 of these now the borrowers, when I talked to them later, 100% of the time say I can't tell you what a life changer this was for me. This changed our world. We know our housing is secure for the rest of our lives. We've got some additional money that we can draw from. We would have had none of that with a regular loan or with just a fully paid for home. It's amazing what it does when you take that weight off of your mind. One of the big things about seniors is you've got this time from now to end of life, and that's what we're talking about is what are we going to do for that period to make it better? And this is one major tool to do that. And, as you can see, this conversation is very different from talking about a normal loan. When I talk about these clients, when there's another loan officer on the line and when we get off of that call, almost 100% of the time, the loan officers will say to me that was completely different than what I expected to hear, because the conversation is so different and the goals of this loan are so different. It's just a very, very, very important thing for seniors to do so.
Speaker 3:Concerns we talked about the concern of using up equity. That just isn't true. Or that you don't own the home totally untrue. It's your home. You can do what you want with it. You don't have to live in it 100% of the year. You just have to make it your primary home. You can rent out rooms, you can raise cows in the backyard, do whatever you want. You can sell it anytime you want. It's just a mortgage. That's all it is. It's just a mortgage. It just has different guidelines.
Speaker 1:And there are kids that will buy it out. They'll pay off the mortgage at the time of the passing and keep the property and the family name.
Speaker 2:I mean that's what it would be, the same thing if there was a traditional loan in place. That would be the option for the kids. So it doesn't matter. But one of the things that people always say to me is it's a very costly loan. What is the? Cost of this loan compared to, maybe, a traditional loan, and why does?
Speaker 3:it happen? That's a good question. It is an FHA loan, so when you have an FHA loan there's cost to do an FHA loan too. It's just a little bit more. In this loan it's 2% of the value of the house and the origination fee to three pieces. 2% of the value of the house goes to the mortgage insurance, then the origination fee is what helps to pay the loan officer to do the loan, and then normal title fees. That's always a concern that I always dress up front with clients and once we go through all of the features of the loan and I relate everything that it does back to this mortgage insurance, that's what makes it possible and the fact that none of that money is cashed out of pocket.
Speaker 3:it comes out of the equity when we set up a loan, so the only cash out of pocket for these loans is that appraisal and HUD counseling. They do need to go through an hour long counseling session with a HUD counselor to make sure that they understand what they're doing and that I'm not lying to them, and that's a real simple process of less than $1,000 cost to get into this loan which, to put it in perspective, regular FHA loans. It's 1.75%.
Speaker 1:that's rolled in. So now that's of the loan amount, that's of the loan amount and he's saying that this is 2% over the purchase price. So it's a little bit of a different shift there. Yeah, but most of the time you're doing an FHA loan you're going in at 96.5% loan to value, so it's almost 100% anyway, so the costs really aren't that much different. The difference is you don't have to come out of pocket for the costs on it, right, and you don't have to pay the cost on it.
Speaker 3:Right, and you don't have to make a payment Now. And if we do, you always do the math. I say when, how, and I usually ask the people in the room. They think about what the current appreciation is on the home and normally the closing costs are repaid with the appreciation in six months, you know, sometimes a little longer, but not that would be on a very, very expensive home. So it's.
Speaker 3:It's really a pretty simple loan to do. There's not a lot of, you know, tax returns, no, no, well, forward loan. I don't want to know about any investments that you have. I don't care about any of that stuff. All we need to know is do you have enough money to pay your taxes, pay your insurance, pay your HOA? Anything that shows up in your credit report like credit cards can hurt All of that plus one penny. Just have to have that income. You're not paying it to us or to the lender, they just want to know you have that kind of income. So it's pay your basic debts plus one penny where on a forward loan you've got, you've got a 50% DTI debt to income ratio. So it's a much different situation and payments are required.
Speaker 2:Why would people make payments just to free up the equity.
Speaker 3:You know there's that's a really good question I'm going to have. I have not go back to that line of credit and it's because it's the most important part of this loan is the line of credit.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Once you activate the loan, you paid off your mortgage and you've got the closing costs, what's left in the amount that you can borrow goes into the line of credit and that's money that's there. It's like a HELOC. It's available for you to use when you want it. So while that money sits there, it's going to grow at the interest rate of the loan. So there's seniors listening to this that are have short their income even though their house is paid for, but they don't have enough income just to get by. They need more income. They can activate that equity and while it's sitting in the line of credit it's going to grow at the interest rate of the loan. In many cases, if you've got a hundred, 200,000 sitting in there, that growth is going to be between one and 3000 a month. A month is going to grow and once they can pull that out monthly or pull it out quarterly and the basis that they started with the 100, 200, 300,000, whatever the basis is will always be there. It's not going to go down. They're just pulling out growth and the growth comes from the equity that was unused on the house.
Speaker 3:It does become debt, but it's a great source of income. You can't really call it incomes, it's not income, it's not taxed, it doesn't go on your tax return. You can use it for whatever you want and it's the most attractive part of this loan Now, if you can make payments. A lot of seniors in their senior years are still working, like myself. If you make a payment on this loan, it does two things. It has the waterfall effect of a normal loan. We're paying part of its principal interest and mortgage insurance.
Speaker 2:And a normal loan.
Speaker 3:when you pay that the only part that you retain is the principal In this loan you're paying every penny. So you pay them $1,000. It pays down the loan $1,000. And it grows the line of credit by $1,000. So the line of credit grows and in that money grows at the interest rate the loan and compounds. That's where people say this sounds too good to be true and it isn't too good to be true. But there's nothing else in finance that does this. And this is what financial planners, when they hear this story about the line of credit, they're saying holy crap, I can't do that well with the funds that I'm using managing for them, and every month that they take out money to make that house payment, it's reducing what I'm managing and reducing my income. So now they're realizing I need to look more at the equity side of this and learn more about it. Do you think a?
Speaker 1:lot of financial planners just don't understand reverse mortgages properly, or why do they not?
Speaker 3:recommend it. Finance financial planners, realtors, CPAs, loan officers 99% of all loan officers don't get it. I was on a call just the other day with our company and one of the top loan officers was suggesting a refinance for seniors that were already on a fixed income, a new 30-year loan to help pay off credit card debt, and I'm trying to get a conversation with him to say that should be illegal. It really should be illegal, or maybe not illegal to do it, but illegal to not at least give the other option, which is the loan that's meant for somebody their age and fits them better.
Speaker 2:What is the approximate current rate right now? At a curiosity, About 8%. That's what I would have guessed, yeah.
Speaker 3:And even on a forward or a normal conventional loan. Steph, you'd know better than I do, but probably mid-sevenths, yeah, that's good.
Speaker 1:I'm ready, not with this past couple of weeks with the Fed and everything, I'm just getting a little brainer Mike we need to get on TikTok.
Speaker 2:We're going to start TikToking you.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I'd love to.
Speaker 2:I can feel a lot of these reverse mortgages.
Speaker 3:I can go on forever.
Speaker 1:I have a couple of questions for you, Mike. What happens when you qualify but your spouse is under 62? How does that get handled?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. The spouse under 62, the amount of money you can borrow is based on the younger of the two people because they're married and they have to be married at closing. So a great example is my example. My wife is 15 years younger than me and our mortgage is pretty substantial. I put my daughter's college into it and all that. So I can't really even do a reverse mortgage because I'm basing it on her age. So I tell her once we get the reverse mortgage done, your new husband will be able to drive my Corvette, ride my Harley and play with my golf clubs. She says nah, he's left-handed.
Speaker 3:The wife can stay in the home for the non-borrowing spouse that's called has the rights to the home for the rest of her life. But the line of credit if there is one is gone. She doesn't have access to that. She could refinance when she turns 62 and maybe recover it. But another really important point about the line of credit let's say you've got a pile of money sitting there and we have what is potentially coming soon as a significant shift in the market where home values are going to drop a lot. The money that's in the line of credit is absolutely protected. It will always grow at the interest rate of the loan and it will always be available as long as you live and no matter what happens to the value of the house. It's amazing. There's nothing in finance that can guarantee that this money will always grow. Even if the interest rates go down to 2%, it'll still grow at about 3% or 4%. Crazy not to activate it.
Speaker 2:You guys are saying to activate it as soon as you can. But what if you want to get the most of that? Let's say you take it at 62 and you get 300,000. Eight years down the road, your house is worth three times that and you want more cash. Can you do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's the same thing you would do with any other mortgage refinance.
Speaker 2:Refine the reverse. Yeah, my sister's a great example, my uncle is a financial advisor who used to sell reverse mortgages, so that's how I'm familiar with him. He took a bunch of money and then he took it when he was young and then his house went up extraordinarily and he was able to take it again.
Speaker 3:My sister after I've had a number of it, the 10-year treasury going up. It's not a good thing now. Right now, stephanie knows refinances just aren't happening because, yes, I know.
Speaker 1:There's a whole lot of credit card debt out there, that's for sure.
Speaker 3:Well, with the credit card, yeah, if you've got credit card debt, definitely it's an option to go drop from 20% to 7% In the reverse mortgage world. Right now, what we're doing is setting up a reverse mortgage is a refinance, because you're taking a non-alone. That's not part of the reverse mortgage world and refinancing to that. So that's happening a lot and purchases are happening a lot. But refinancing hecom to hecom or reverse mortgage to reverse mortgage, that's not happening much right now.
Speaker 3:But once the interest rates come back down or treasury comes down, it's going to be a boom town for seniors who have been able to have the opportunity to take advantage of the change. I did a lot of those before the rates went up. Some people who took out a loan one year, a year later, come back and say I want to take more, I want to go buy a Volkswagen. That's the true story of this lady. I said well, I don't know, it's only been a year, but appreciation was so extreme and the rates were so low. She was able to not only get her Volkswagen but a lot more money, and that was only waiting one year.
Speaker 2:I haven't had one other silly thing. So what are the tax consequences? I know in a traditional mortgage you can write off your interest. Are there any write-off or something? What?
Speaker 3:That is a really good question. If you make a payment, then part of your payment goes toward interest, so you'll get a 10.98, like you would on a normal one. And for your kids, let's say the home values have gone up a lot, but the loan amount that well, I'm going to go back a little bit. If they sell the house and you've had the loan for 10 years, they're paying off 10 years of interest. So the heirs even if there isn't any equity left, the heirs will be getting this fairly substantial 10.98 that they can use on their taxes, even though the new tax law, the Trump tax law, the standard deduction is huge. So the 10.98 or interest deduction that you get from your bank really isn't doing you any good. But if they get a huge 10.98 through the sale of a home that originally had a reverse on it, it can be a heck of a good deduction.
Speaker 1:Now, that being said, too, though I think the flip side of it, which is also very important from the tax perspective, is what you had mentioned earlier. A lot of times, this is what's saving people from dipping into their. Iras or other tax consequential accounts that they have.
Speaker 1:So, in that perspective, this is income tax for your money when you're accessing the money. So, yes, you might have a $20,000, even if it's a very this is more on the extreme. If you were to have a higher purchase price or something a higher home value you might have $20,000 of mortgage insurance wrapped in. That's still cheaper than your tax bill on that amount of income.
Speaker 3:Right, Right, yeah. If you coordinate the equity that's sitting on this side of the bucket and then the savings for the IRA, 401K, whatever, on this side of the bucket and you can, in a down year, not take that $80,000 a year that many seniors do on a down year, don't take it from here and take it over from the equity side. They're actually taking $60,000 because it's not taxed. They'll end up with the same thing, but they're not selling stock at a loss and they're retaining the value. That's in that package.
Speaker 3:And there is a real spreadsheet that we use where the IRA starts at $1 million and over the past 20 years these are real numbers the stock market was down, I think, five times On those down years. You don't pull the $80,000 from those funds and pull them from the equity and at the end of that 20 years that IRA is still worth $1 million. But if you don't do that coordination, the IRA is worth $150,000. You still have the debt that you just grew on the home side, but you're not making that payment and it's paid back after you die. So it's all about what are we doing in this period between now and end of life, and that's what this program is really meant to address.
Speaker 1:So many wonderful things. Thank you so much, Mike. Rebecca, did you have any other questions on the topic? I know we could go around so much, but I think we covered a ton.
Speaker 2:It's so interesting and I just really want to get this message out to people. It is such a great tool and I just don't understand why people don't use it more. But we're going to get you out there. You're going to be all over social media. I appreciate that You're going to be all over our mortgage.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a crazy, crazy underrated product that everyone that listens to me talks after how much time do we have? When I start talking to people, they always say how much time do we need? And I said you should at least a lot two hours. And they think, oh my God, I start talking and at the end of I get about an hour into it and I say you want me to keep going. They say keep going, it just takes that long, you don't really go over it.
Speaker 3:That lady in Utah once who got on the call and said I'm against this, I don't want to do it, but I was recommended that I talk to you, so let's start talking. This is on Saturday morning Not my favorite time to do this. As we started to enter hour three that morning, she finally Because we talked about a lot of other things kids and family and all that but as we just started at hour three, she stopped me and says Mike, I'm going to stop you there and I figured, okay, we're done. She says I just want to let you know I get it Now. I get it. How do it? Now let's talk about how do I use the money. It was a completely different conversation but she came in pretty negative and very, very few are still negative when we're done talking.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much. It was so great to meet you. I hope that we'll be doing a lot of business together and we're going to continue to get this message out to the people of Palm Beach. But, in conclusion, I know you love our area, so why don't you tell us? The story.
Speaker 3:Well, I was going to go back a little bit. When I got out of the Army in 72, I was in the Vietnam era my brother called me and said I want to buy a hang glider. So I got into hang gliding and that's what I did for years and years. I was like you know, here are my ski bombs. I was a hang glider bomb just flying in several places around the world. And then, but in Florida they have several hang gliding sites where they tow you up, you know, with a little airplane, a little baby airplane, and tow the hang glider up and just the flying over. This is in Orlando area and near Disney, disney World. That's in Orlando, right, yes, and there's a couple of big hang gliding sites there that are pretty special to go, you know, do that?
Speaker 1:It's a nice little day trip from us. Why don't we go up, rebecca, I'm ready.
Speaker 2:Everybody's down to fun, I was able to go and we went and took those little biplanes up by Kissimmee. They were like little World War II planes and there you go and my nephew, we flew them and we were all in different planes and it was really a lot of fun.
Speaker 3:Wow. Yeah, I can't fly hang gliders anymore, but I still do. I got two airplanes, so it's nice to be able to fly around here.
Speaker 1:Well, that's awesome. Thank you guys so much. Thank you guys for listening into this episode of I Love Palm Beach, and until next time, have a great week. Have a great week. Have a great week.
Speaker 3:Have a good day everybody.
Speaker 2:Bye.