Equity Release

tel_jon

Does anyone have any advice on equity release for the over 60's?

lisyloo

Age concern have loads of advice. They have lots of factsheets and even books. Try their website.

My personla experience is that downsizing or moving to a cheaper area is a lot more cost effective if you can bear to part with the existing house. There are a number of downsides to equity release esepcially if relatively young, the main being it's an expensive way of doing things.

EdInvestor

Check out the protection arrangements and deal only with these providers:

https://www.ship-ltd.org

Plenty of info on the site.

margaretclare

tel_jon wrote:

Does anyone have any advice on equity release for the over 60's?

You can't answer such a wide-ranging and general enquiry. Just what do you want to know? Are you considering this, if so, why? Everyone's circumstances will be different. The SHIP website should be the first place to look, other than that, this topic has been discussed on different places here on Martin's site - look on the Silver Savers board for example, where it comes up regularly.

We did this 3 years ago because we had an existing mortgage that we'd still have been paying until we're 83 and we could think of pleasanter uses for the £260 a month we'd have been spending. Some people want to release money slowly over time, treat it as income rather than a lump sum. There are schemes now which allow you to do this. It all depends what you want. In addition, 'over 60' is probably too young. One of us had to be 68 before we could release 25% of the valuation and that enabled us to pay off the existing mortgage - the valuation was £140K and it's now approx £165K what with the new roof and everything, which we'd have struggled to pay for if we'd still been paying £260 a month on a mortgage!

However, it needs a lot of careful thought and may not be a good idea for everyone. As lisyloo says, downsizing or moving to a cheaper area may be the better idea - for us, there's not much you can downsize to from a 2-bed 1930s bungalow, and moving to an ex-mining village in the Midlands did not appeal. Not even moving to northern France where property is half the price it is here - DH cannot get his head around the language!!! But we did consider a lot of options, which you have to do.

HTH

Margaret