Rant #2,879: A Question of Temperature

This is going to be one of the hardest and most difficult Rants for me to ever have written, and you will see why I am spending a sleepless night putting this thing together.
 
It involves my family’s future, and the future does not look to pretty bright now.
 
My wife is 65, I will reach that age in exactly one week, and at this moment, we don’t know what the future holds for us, and for our son, who turns 27 in August.
 
And it all has to do with this question: where are we going to live in a year, five years, 10 years, or even further into the future?
 
And this all has to do with something called a “reverse mortgage.”
 
I am sure you have seen actor Tom Selleck on TV representing one of those companies that offers older home owners a reverse mortgage to help them to better handle their affairs as they get older.
 
A reverse mortgage, in its very basic terms, is what it says it is: it reverses the mortgage that one has paid on their home, so that the bank now basically owns your home.
 
In return, they give the former owner that has entered into this situation pretty much an allowance for what they need each month, but it draws off that mortgage that has been previously paid off by the owner, so the owner has a steady stream of cash coming in each month to pay off bills and whatever else needs to be paid for.
 
Several years ago, my parents became interested in this way of living out their retirement years.
 
My father was still alive and still working ridiculous hours at this time, and my mother wanted to make life a bit easier for him, thinking that if they had a steady stream of money coming in each month as the reverse mortgage guaranteed, my father would work less, or even retire.
 
My parents supposedly did all of their homework on reverse mortgages. They went to seminars, spoke to others who were knowledgeable on the subject, and they thought they understood these things inside and out.
 
When the time came, they entered into a reverse mortgage, much to my chagrin, because as my family was living in the same house as they were as a tenant, we knew from the get-go that this agreement could not benefit us at all.
 
But I thought that if it made life easier for them,, then so be it … it was so many years ago, my parents were healthy, and such things as their eventual passings weren't even on the landscape.
 
As a tenant, I also had to sign some paperwork in this agreement, and I agreed to do this only because I thought it would help my parents out as they got older … no, I am not looking for pats on the back for doing this, but that is the way I felt—
 
You know, we would deal with other aspects later, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
 
Well, in the intervening years, the reverse mortgage did help out my parents greatly, but even though the negatives about the reverse mortgage were kind of pushed to the back of our minds, they lingered uncomfortably in my mind and my wife’s mind.
 
My father passed away nearly two years ago, and happily, during his final years, money was never something that he had to worry about.
 
My mother, thank God, is as healthy as can be, and at 91, heck, we should all be as healthy and alert as she is. She is a medical marvel, and perhaps the reverse mortgage has even helped her and helped extend her life, as much as it has helped my father, because her finances have not been a worry to her.
 
But that still leaves the question about what the future holds for myself and my family.
 
I hope my mom lives at least another 91 years, but no one can predict how many years my mom has left on this earth.
 
There is going to come a time when the presence of the reverse mortgage is going to boomerang in my family’s faces, and we have to prepare for the inevitable: when she passes, the bank is either going to ask us for payment in full to fulfill the mortgage, and if they do not get it, then they will fully take over the house, look to sell it, and we will be given x amount of days to vacate the premises.
 
With my family’s savings, I know that we cannot possibly fulfill the mortgage when that comes due. We are far from being destitute, thank goodness, but the hit that I took from losing my job and being sent out to pasture at the too-early age of 62 resonates in the situation.

My father always told us that there would be money to pay for this when he and my mother left us, but I am not so sure of that; maybe it was wishful thinking,, but to me, if you enter into such an agreement, you can’t possibly have a large sum of money on hand, because simply, why would you enter into a reverse mortgage if you already had this amount of cash at your disposal?
 
There are some other problems related to this.
 
My sister has as much right to this house as I do, and it will also impact her and her family when that dreaded day comes, even though she lives elsewhere.
 
And my son … whatever you want to say about New York State, one thing that you cannot say is that it does not take care of its disabled populace.
 
He gets services by being a New York State resident that he cannot get anywhere else in the country, and there are further services that he gets because we live in the county that we do that are also unique to the area and the country.
 
Although he has made great strides, he cannot live alone, and may never be able to live fully by himself.
 
So we are in quite a conundrum right now about our future, but we are starting to take notice of it and trying to do something about it.
 
Through friends of ours, we will soon be speaking to a lawyer about this, what our rights are, and what we can do about all of this so that we aren’t thrown to the curb in the future.
 
I will be asking my mother some very tough questions in the coming hours about this reverse mortgage agreement that she has, and although I won’t be blunt about this—I mean, this is my mother—I need the right answers, I need specific information, and I need it all very soon.
 
Funny, I have no anger in my heart about all of this, none at all.
 
My parents did what they thought was necessary, something that they felt would help them in their later years, and I cannot argue with that; it has helped them out immeasurably.
 
I guess you can say that I am a bit disappointed, for lack of a better word to describe the way I feel right now.
 
My wife and I are now looking at our own later years, and the future doesn’t look very bright, not with this hanging over our heads.
 
Where are we going to live when we are 70, 75, 80 or even older?
 
This is something that most people of that age really don’t have to worry about if they are healthy. At that stage of the game, this stuff should all be taken care of, and those years should be worry-free about what your living arrangement will be when you get to an advanced age.
 
But for my wife and myself, things are very unclear right now, and we have the extra worry about our son and his future.
 
Right now, the first thing I need to do is get the information I need from my mother,, then speak to somebody who is more knowledgeable about this than we are to find out what our rights are and how we might go about navigating through this.
 
Yes, the water is murky for us, but I hope we can keep our heads above that murky water so that our golden years are just that, and not filled with pain.
 
But I know that the shark is out there, just waiting for us to float within its reach.