but before that i want to get into what you can do is residents of belmont to make sure that the pain of what your fair share is and don't want to additionally but your title to as seniors in the community for additional tax relief i'll start up the first part of what  you're around base that would be to either come into our office or go to the website and review your property record what your property records the description we have of your property and that's the basis of your taxes but your assessment i we're taxing on is what's there so it's very important that you keep the check up with your property to make sure what we do have is what you're set for now let's say you come across something and it's before the tax code comes out  something wrong and down to us or if you disagree with what our property value is for your property and own stuff in belmont right now we're going up up but it is important that what you have is a property is represented in our tax rules now you can come down in january and the deadline for this is majority of your life and if you qualify for exemption please apply for it because it just doesn't it goes unused as a part of our account that was the return of the general fund of the town but if you qualify for it i just a thirty four year old private nonprofit charitable organization we're primarily educational but we do in home face to face counseling so we come out to the elder  home because so many folks are homebound these days and we do have in common outside guidelines but we could you know talk to you about those afterwards let me give you some statistics if you're having trouble making ends meet there's a reason in massachusetts there are a million point five homeowners with approximately thirty one percent or four hundred seventy thousand homes owned by individuals is fifty five and older the federal reserve says that those people age sixty five to seventy five a sustaining a disproportionate level of burden of debt and that's the highest of any gro of two thousand and seventeen massachusetts is the second most costly state in the nation for those over sixty five to maintain maintain basic living costs we were forty seventh for a couple of years we've dropped back to forty ninth again and as of two thousand and seventeen sixty one percent of massachusetts elders and seventy four percent of single women possess incomes which are economically insecure the national average is fifty eight percent so we're well over both those limits while elders experience a greater level of economic insecurity there are a lot of safety net programs and to maintain their homes as an agency promotes a team can case management model with the utilization of legal services social services and i was specialties so if you were to be counseled by us we may recommend that you see legal services we may recommend or put you in touch with a social services program that we think could help you what we try to do is allow you to maintain yourself in your home as long as you can do so safely the common financial issues that we run across are the fact that you're on a fixed income the income doesn't increase costs are becoming a big issue because people have been putting off generally if you're older you work on paying for your medications paying food paying your taxes and you don't have extra money for home repairs and a lot of the people that have credit cards that i've personally counseled using the credit facility stuff using it to pay for prescriptions they using it to pay for their taxes they're using it for basic living needs and eventually that comes back to haunt them we encourage elders to take a long term feel what we like to see you do and when you can pay the gas bill it's a tough thing to do we encourage you to look one five ten even twenty years down the road think about what you want to deal with as you age do you want to continue to pay taxes do you want to continue to deal  with making sure the house is in good repair do you want if you have a two family do you want to deal with tenants anymore so we want to take a long term view take a look at your budget and then we will help you to make decisions on what's the best option and best course of action for you the alternatives would be possibly to sell to transition to a smaller home or a condominium  senior housing or assisted living the problem is that the senior housing lists a phenomenally long we have seen them as much as five to seven years long so if you are thinking you really do have to plan long term if you are thinking about transitioning to senior housing or assisted living because generally those units only become available when someone enters a nursing home or passes away we've seen some shifts in the people that we we're shifting to younger elders with more debt when the pro program was initiated we were seeing elderly when i was at about age eighty five and that was basically the bulk of our clients now we're seeing elders that are just sixty two married couples having more  living on their home equity line if they have one in credit cards not for any isn't lifestyle but for payments of basic living needs we've seen people that have done multiple refinances to the point where they're really depleted their equity already we've seen many long term mortgage defaults i had one gentleman who is known to fall for it for ten years and he was finally being foreclosed on so we're seeing foreclosures builder is now and what's happening is that the banks that have been putting off some of these foreclosures are now cleaning out their foreclosure inventory we've also seen multiple cards for funding in programs for housing nobody's building elder housing anymore so it makes the position more difficult we're seeing multiple generations living in a household the mother with the an unmarried son who got to voice the whole lost a job the mother whose daughter is going through a divorce and has children so you're seeing three and four generations in the home  equity lines of credit were affordable when the person when the individuals were paying interest only but now that those home equity lines have come to the point where they need to pay principal and interest  payments triple roughly and that makes it all the more difficult property tax defaults and becoming more and more common both for elders with and without reverse mortgages  people who have unexpected illness or expenses that's one of the major things that we see on a regular basis we view any moment as a last resort but alone sometimes is the only alternative the home equity conversion mortgages those loans that you see on television with tom selleck talking about them they're not always the answer even though they have bad press they can be proper in certain circumstances as long as you're fully counseled and you know what your expenses are and you know what's going to happen many changes to the program over the two or three years have made marginal clients more on likely to be able to get a reverse mortgage and the banks no longer have to the banks don't longer have to  make any arrangements with you if you should fall behind in your taxes so that really puts the burden on to make sure that those tax the pain what we encourage others to do is is to make sure that even if they had an arrangement with the tax collector in town to paying half for some portion of their real estate taxes over thirty days or sixty days that doesn't fly with a reverse mortgage so a lot of things there are a lot of moving parts a lot of things are changing what we try to do for you is to make sure that you are aware of all of the programs that are out there and may be available for you we don't force you to apply for them we tell you about them we're primarily educational we want you to see the programs understand whether or not you may qualify and then to make the decision for yourself but we're trying to give you sufficient tools in the tool box to make those decisions with education questions question on like a forward mortgage is like a forward woman stood on its head we have a traditional mortgage you don't have a lot of equity you make your payments every month and you build equity a reverse mortgage assumes that you have a bunch of that  no money so it allows you can to convert the equity to cash it's an expensive program you see the ads and they say you can stay there for so long as you lie down and yes you can stay there for as long as you want but you have to pay the taxes you have to live there you have to keep the insurance on the property and you have to keep threatening good repair oh you have to pay taxes and insurance  not the town has to agree to different taxes and i don't know what belmont's position is but a lot of towns won't agree to defer taxes because the home equity conversion mortgage has the potential for using up all of the equity and then some so conceivably within reach so conceivably with the reverse mortgage you could be leaving the house owing more than the house is worth and that's the they have the what we call first position so they super the town supersedes the town tax liability supersedes the mortgage so it steps ahead of the mortgage if the mortgage is small enough it's not a big deal  if it's like a reverse mortgage where it will be more than the value of the house i'm sure the town would not agree to that because their chance of getting something is substantially decrease haven't had a maximum but we haven't seen anything really more than ten or eleven and usually it's had a lot of years and it is something that's seen as bad as transfers and this was all over that point and it's that simple interest or compounding interest the federal reverse mortgage is one type of mortgage but you can take the money in several different ways for the federal reverse mortgage you can take a ten year program which means you get a certain amount of money every month or you can take a term plan which would give you a certain amount of money for a certain amount of time or you could take a line of credit where is where is if you are if your budget feeling balanced and you want this is the backstop for emergencies or unforeseen expenses the equity line of credit would just sit there until you actually draw our own it or you could take a combination of a term or a ten year with a partial equity line of credit there's also a lot of some option and we've seen most of the defaults that we've seen are people who have taken along some have a loan for roughly five to seven years that seems to be the magic number and then they're out of money and can't afford to pay the taxes usually it's what we're saying is defaults in reverse mortgages are failure to certify residence thing which is easily corrected and real estate tax issues mostly real estate taxes there were issues with in the past but through a supreme court decision has been somewhat reduced is that quite often in the early part of the reverse mortgage program if the wife was substantially younger than the husband it take the wife off the deed so that they would qualify for moment the reverse mortgage program runs from age sixty two to age one hundred so they assume you're going to live to be one hundred and it's just like any piece of any pai the younger you are the smaller the piece the live the lives of the piece of pie you can qualify for monthly so what would happen is you know if the wife was only sixty two and the husband was seventy take the wife off the day because every calculation is done based on the youngest of the couple they get more money because the husband was seventy and then the problem came when the husband the wife had no interest in the property she was quite often effected because she had no interest in the property and this was her home but it was gone because the reverse mortgage came to when the husband passed that's been changed so that the wife can continue i'm saying you can't get any more money and the thing is that what i don't tell you in those reverse mortgage ads is that yes you can stay there for the rest of your life as long as you can pay your taxes insurance and keep the property repaired and live there practically speaking if you're not getting any money from the reverse mortgage anymore you probably won't be able to afford to stay in your home and if you've been getting a from that reverse mortgage right along when that stops when the money runs out you won't be able to afford to live in your home it will have to be sold yes  it can be depending upon the needs of the elder we have folks that want to reverse mortgage want to reverse mortgage and just when we were on the numbers it just doesn't work or it works just barely and those are the people that run into trouble one time yes your experience with people on exactly what we try to do as i said we  exemption get food stamps get fuel assistance get the hot wrap program take advantage of those services and benefits and programs that  you have frankly paid for all of your working life that quite often if there's not a huge shortfall that at least helps people to break even if not come up with a little bit of a surplus we always recommend you talk to the shine counselor as well in the show you kind of lose somebody experts on health insurance for elders sometimes you're paying a phenomenal amount of health insurance premium if you sat down with the shine counselor and the right saying it's going to happen but it's possible that you could get similar coverage for a small price so that's what we tried to do is we try to assemble all of these various programs we've had calls for people that want into a reverse mortgage for home repairs there are homely pam programs out there that there's not many grant programs anymore but there are low interest no interest no low interest no interest for doing that i counseled a lady in pittsfield and she had shoulder issues and need issues and we go out or to apply for the mass rehab program completely redid her bathroom and she was able to remain in her home because now she has a you know they put the they put the safety up and they did a walk in shower for her yes she'll have to pay for it but she's done paying it's similar to the reverse mortgage program she doesn't have to pay until she sells the house but it allows her to remain in her home and you know safely so those are the things we look at we look at all of the programs that are out there housing has programs for low interest no interest loans in the western part of the state the department of agriculture has loans low interest no interest for the folks who need repairs and so forth mass housing has an excellent program if you have to bathe lead paint or if you have a septic issue  so we encourage elders to look at all of those things rather than just go onto a reverse mortgage as a first line of defense because the reap the reverse mortgage program it's a good program under the circumstances but it is very expensive your clothes and cost average about ten thousand dollars up front and if you haven't been current with your taxes in the two years before you get the reverse mortgage there will be a life expectancy set aside there are lots of companies and banks that do for reverse mortgages but many of them are out of state and many of them if you were wondering what approved lenders there are in massachusetts there's a list on the division of bank website in massachusetts we're fortunate in that we have to any lender that wants to land in massachusetts must register and be approved by the massachusetts division of banks so they have published on their website a list of approved reverse mortgage lenders by the same token and the counseling agency must be approved by the executive and that list is on the executive office of elder p s website so there are counseling agencies out there there are banks out there not everyone would offer reverse mortgages because a lot of the bigger banks did get out of the program when when the recession hit back in two thousand and seven banks like bank of america and metlife got out of the program because they were seeing what was happening  there are our agency our executive director developed and when he conversion program for the commonwealth it is an approved plan with the division of  it utilizes local certainly local lenders and it is the cost of much less but they are term loans so that means that you have to agree that you're going to sell before the term end so each of them has their benefits each of them has their drawbacks and we have to make sure that before we even recommend a loan to our executive director who would then offer it to a bank sell it depends we kept our term reverse mortgages at sixty two percent of you so if you it's a penny one how much you need and what the value of your home is and what needs to be paid off  the term loan we back into the term from the front end maximum is fifteen years there is a c lock program it's a senior line of credit that utilizes only thirty five percent maximum value and that's a maximum ten year term yes  or the interest rate is determined by the bank we don't determine the last one i saw britain was three point eight on the state reverse mortgage on the federal reverse mortgage it's up around five six right now because of the mortgage insurance and those are all in just the state program has a fixed rate the adjustable of the federal program is an adjustable rate there is a fixed rate option but it is extremely  other questions issues no that's wrong it would be on our know as far as an appropriate product for the bank to underwri i don't know if it's that they use this cd b j money but i think a lot of the compliance officers just see this because it's different when they freak i mean they've got over i documents with a banks and credit union is one country bank out in the western part of the state very large federal credit union a video a real sec savings they all participate in that program and that's the only money that we make from the program is the licensing fee here we don't charge for a service we don't get any money it doesn't we don't get any money one way or the other so we have no interest in selling you a loan if we think it's a good fit if we can place it with a lender we try to make it work but we licensed the the documentation basically to the local banks and then it's up to them to underwrite the loan and make sure they think it's a good risk for them but again there are any reverse mortgage any loan is expensive the interest compounds on ours as well and the compounds monthly so it does rack up fairly quickly