With the economic crisis hitting everyone, many seniors are considering taking a reverse mortgage. The days of quick refinances and plentiful home equity lines are a thing of the past.

Seniors took out 112,100 Home Equity Conversion Mortgages, a government-backed reverse mortgage, in fiscal year 2008, which ended September 30, up from 107,558 in 2007, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

New rules went into affect in November that make reverse mortgages a better deal for consumers. Older homeowners can now borrow up to $417,000 with federally insured reverse mortgages. And the fees that lenders can charge were lowered to origination fees of 2 percent on the initial $200,000 of the home’s value (lesser of the home value or county lending limit) and 1 percent on the balance thereafter, with a cap of $6,000.

Find out how much you qualify for with a Free Reverse Mortgage Quote.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Reverse Mortgage News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.