IN PARTNERSHIP WITH SPRY FINANCE
A Lifetime Loan is a way to release equity in your home. Here is how one woman went about it …
Olivia (not her real name) is 61 and lives alone in a Victorian redbrick terraced house in south central Dublin and has done for the past 23 years. She’s single with no children of her own, but she has three siblings and seven nieces and nephews, ranging in age from 10 to 27. Olivia’s still working – having enjoyed a long and satisfying career in marketing, she hopes to be able to defer retirement for as long as she can, not for any reason other than she loves her job and being able to get up in the morning and go to work.
Her house was built right at the beginning of the last century and requires some home upgrades and maintenance. She’s extremely fond of the house – and says that she “loves turning the key in the lock today as much as she did when she bought it”. One of the reasons that she’s never extended out to the back is because she so fond of the windows in the kitchen – original wooden sash windows.
And that’s where her Spry Finance Lifetime Loan journey started. The windows in her house, front and back, were the windows that came with the house and, while they had stood the test of time, they were draughty and in dire need of replacing. Clearly, Olivia had a choice between replacing them with UPVC frames or with wooden frames to echo the originals – but either way, it was a big job and a considerable investment.
At the same time, Olivia was thinking about her finances generally – specifically that she still had a small mortgage outstanding on the house, and wished to make some top-up payments into her pension pot. ‘I considered the traditional lenders” she says, “but at my age they won’t look at me. And anyway, I wanted to get rid of debt.”
Clearly, there were other options available to her – she could have solved the window problem altogether and sold up, but that would have meant moving away. She might have rented out a room to a lodger, she said, “but a monthly rental income wouldn’t cover the cost of replacing the windows.” What she does have, however, is her house – a house which she bought for around €250k in 2001 and which is now worth in the region of €900k. It was a family member who told her about Spry Finance, and she soon decided to “let the house pay for the loan”.
Earlier this year, Olivia took just over 11% of the value of her house, which provided enough money to pay down her mortgage, add a lump sum to her pension and start work on bringing her beautiful sash windows into the 21st century. (At the time of writing, the work has been completed and Olivia is absolutely delighted with it.)
“I want to make a difference to my own life.”
“Refinancing my mortgage has meant that I can now put the money that I spent on mortgage repayments into my pension pot,” Olivia says. She confi rms that the process of arranging the Lifetime Loan with Spry’s consultant was easy and hassle-free and that there was no pressure on her to make any decision at all.
“But then, I knew exactly what I was doing, I understand how the loan works and it’s not something that bothers me. I also know I can choose to make payments if I want to. At the moment, I’m going to let a month or two go by, although I’ll probably put something against it in the future.” “Ultimately,” Olivia says “I need to look after myself and be comfortable – and why shouldn’t my house help me do that?”
FEATURES OF A LIFETIME LOAN
• A Lifetime Loan allows you to release money from your principal private residence, tax free, without having to sell it.
• You retain full ownership of the property.
• The property must be in the Republic of Ireland.
• Property must have a minimum value of €175,000 outside of Dublin and €250,000 in Dublin.
• The amount you can borrow is calculated as a percentage of your home’s value and depends on your age.
• Lifetime Loans are designed for people aged 60 years and over – e.g. customers aged 60 may borrow up to a maximum of 15% of the value of their property.
• The loan is usually repaid from your estate or the sale of your property.
• You can choose to make optional repayments up to 10% of the original loan balance yearly to help manage the loan balance.
• The Spry Finance No Negative Equity Guarantee means you will never owe more than the value of your home.
For more information visit www.spryfinance.ie or call 01 5822570.
Seniors Money Mortgages (Ireland) DAC, trading as Seniors Money, Spry Finance and Spry is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.
