Cynthia, 70, can pinpoint the day some fifty years ago when she realized she always wanted to live in the house she grew up in. “I remember as a 20-year-old running down the side of the house with all the greenery around me and hearing the frogs and the birds, and I thought, you know, I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to stay right here.”
Now, thanks to a HomeSafe reverse mortgage from Finance of America Reverse, she can enjoy her retirement in the Santa Monica Canyon, California home she loves.
Home to Stay
Cynthia’s house was precious to her from her very earliest memory. When Cynthia was a year old, her mother moved to California from Ohio and bought this piece of land a couple blocks from the beach. Her mother’s eight siblings moved there, too, and Cynthia grew up surrounded by family. She remembers a wonderful childhood, exploring the beach and falling asleep to the sound of crickets and frogs at night.
“I really enjoyed the area,” she remembers. “So much that when I was in my 20s, I was engaged to a guy from New York. He said I had to move to New York. I chose my house over him.”
She eventually married someone more amenable to staying in the home she calls “the love of my life.” The couple undertook a major renovation expanding the house from 750 to 2,200 square feet.
Cynthia had paid off the mortgage by the time her daughter was born in 1996. Then, “for nine glorious years, I didn’t worry about a mortgage,” she remembers. “It was wonderful.”
Years later, Cynthia and her husband divorced, and she took on a new 30-year mortgage to buy out her ex-husband. She tried to make it work but found it burdensome to carry a mortgage, a line of credit, and credit card debt, so she began investigating ways to combine all of her debt into one mortgage.
“I had debt, and I was getting older,” she says.
