Bob and the stinky advice

Laurie Denker MacNaughton ©2021

I’ll call him Bob.

Bob is an advisor with a mainstream financial services firm, and he and I have a mutual client.

I will call her Ellen.

Ellen is 78, widowed, and is selling her current home and purchasing a new home closer to friends and family. Initially she thought she would purchase using a traditional mortgage, but she couldn’t qualify due to insufficient income.

Her “forward” loan officer sent her over to my office, where I easily qualified her for a reverse for purchase home loan.

Enter Bob.

Without making the effort to acquaint himself with details of reverse for purchase, he proceeded to pick up the phone and call Ellen. For fully fifteen minutes he spewed dire warnings that she would lose all her money; that it was a terrible “investment”; that she would end up with nothing. In other words, he scared the daylights out of her.

And here’s the thing: if fifty people tell you the skittles are good, and one person tells you there could be a poisoned skittle, you’re probably not touching the skittles.

But suppose the person warning you about the skittles doesn’t have any data about whether one skittle was poisoned. It’s just something he heard. And he won’t revisit his hunch – but he’s pretty sure he’s heard of a guy who knew a guy who met a guy who got sick on a skittle.

I’m the first to say there is no one right financial product for everyone. There simply isn’t. But for many aging homebuyers, reverse for purchase is a fantastic option: they can get into an appropriate aging-in-place home without picking up a monthly mortgage payment. Or, like Ellen, it can make possible the purchase of an appropriate home when it otherwise was not.

In my many years as a reverse mortgage specialist I can honestly say I have run into not more than a couple Bobs. Financial advisors are well known for paying scrupulous attention to hard data, education, and their clients’ needs. And this is a darn good thing – because one advisor’s stinky advice can cause an awful lot of emotional upheaval, anxiety, and deep distress.

No one knows everything. Everyone needs input.

But fallacious input can be hard – very, very hard indeed – to un-hear.

If you have – or someone you know has – questions regarding reverse mortgage, give me a call. I am always available to answer questions, and I always love hearing from you.