Jim Thompson
I had heard about the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage, and I thought, well, I wanna learn a little bit more about it. But I found pretty quickly that not everyone knows about them.
Itâs the opposite of what a lot of people fear it is, in the sense that they think itâs a risk to lose their house, when itâs really a better way to make sure they can preserve the house, at least for them to be in the house.
So, in my own personal situation, thatâs where I started.Â
I bought a house, I had a mortgage on it, and I had paid off a mortgage before, two of them before, because thatâs what everybody does, right?
You pay off your house as soon as you can and you get that mortgage burning party, which didnât do me any good because I just had a lot of money tied up in a house.
And I use the example when you go down to the grocery store and you bring your statements, and say, âLook, I have a paid off house.â
And they go, âWell, thatâs very nice. Good for you. But we use cash here, so it doesnât really help.â
So, thankfully, I met Michael Inkman and started hearing more about what Fairway Mortgage was doing, and it was a different story than what Iâd heard before.
So anyway, I thought, Iâm gonna to use the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage to alleviate having to make any more mortgage payments and be able to have a line of credit that I could access that money to use for who knows what.
Iâm gonna use it to do some things to improve the house. I may use it for some other investment opportunities that might come up.
But the main thing is itâs saving X amount of dollars every month that I was just putting inside the four walls of the home that I canât access to use.Â
So to me, it made a lot of sense. So I started with me.
Michael is, you know, he is a genuine friend.
Heâs concerned about whatâs happening with our clients. He wants to help them. Heâs not pushy or pressuring or any of those kinds of things.
Heâs knowledgeable and he wants to help our advisors deal with all of the issues, not just, âWe can get you a great rate and youâll be fine.â No, you wonât be fine.Â
Youâll have a lot of other things you have to deal with. So the great rate is not the panacea, itâs how you put all of those plans together and what you do in the future to make sure that thatâs gonna happen.
And it doesnât just happen, you know, money doesnât just fall out of the government tree, notwithstanding what some people think.
It has to be planted and watered and nurtured and grown, and then you have to be very careful how you pick it.