The CEO of Longbridge Financial says when it comes to retirement, it is never too early to think about how you will use your home equity as you age.

"You really should be thinking about the home and the mortgage, your largest asset in retirement. You may decide that a reverse mortgage works. You may decide that HELOC or something else works. But whatever it is, ignoring that asset entirely probably doesn't make much financial sense," said Chris Mayer.

Longbridge Financial in Paramus, NJ, is a financial services company. They now offer HELOC for Seniors in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Washington. This program allows borrowers over the age of 62 to make interest-only payments, as long as they live in their home and make other required payments. The balance of the loan is paid back when they move out.

This is in addition to their Platinum Preserve and Platinum Peak products.

“What happens with Platinum Preserve is, it’s the first product in the market that allows you to take a portion of the home and say, 'I care about giving money to my kids, or I want to put money aside so if I have to sell my home, I may use it for assisted living. I may use it for health care expenses or other things. I want to give it to charity or to somebody else important in my life, if I don't have kids.' So, you can take a portion of your home, say 30% of your home, and say, ‘You know what, I'm going to reserve 30% of my home that I'm going to give to my kids no matter what happens with the reverse mortgage, as long as I pay my property tax and insurance and as long as I cooperate with the lender upon sale the home, I'm going to get 30% of the value of the sale price of that home to give to my kids, to have available to me if I sell the home and move into assisted living, whatever it is I want to do with that portion of the home that's going to be mine or my heirs, to decide what we want,'" said Mayer.

"And that is something that hasn't really been available before in this market. That you can preserve some of your home value for another use. And so we're very excited to launch Platinum Preserve because we recognize surveys from Fannie Mae and other sources suggest half to two-thirds of people who respond say what they really want to use with their home equity is actually to help the next generation, and this product allows them to do that.”

Mayer said leadership at Longbridge knows they are drawing outside of the traditional lines. But it's worth it to find innovative solutions for people in retirement.

"You have got to think out of the box. Look, we're in an industry where people bring a lot of ideas, a lot of preconceived ideas about reverse mortgages to the table. Some of them are right. Some of them are things that people hear or think they know that may not be accurate. And the thing about this product is it helps you better understand that at the end of the day, this is just a mortgage," said Mayer.

Mayer then explained the Platinum Peak program and how it differs from Platinum Preserve.

“They're not joined at the hip. They're two different products," said Mayer. "Platinum Peak is designed for people who want to get the most possible proceeds from a reverse mortgage. It allows borrowers to get up to 20 to 25% more proceeds than they would get from an FHA program. In fact, it's the highest proceeds available of any product on the market today that we're aware of. And so that product is really designed for people who want and need to access the most money they can out of their home. And this product is really about serving that demographic."

Mayer said there's $14 trillion of home equity for people who are 62 and older. There are about 12,000 people a day turning 65 years old. About 75% of them own a home, he said.

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