Many mortgage holders expecting post-retirement payments

March 12, 2024 by Heidi

Home owners

More than one out of every five people over 55 years of age with a mortgage is expecting to still be making payments on it after they stop working, new data has revealed.

This data is provided by the Equity Release Council (ERC), and it indicates that many more people in the future will be retiring before they pay off their mortgages in full. The figures from the survey that the ERC carried out suggest that there will be over half a million people who find themselves in this position.

On top of that, the poll also shows that another 19% of 55-and-over mortgage holders are not sure if they will manage to pay them off completely before they retire. When it comes to the figures across different age ranges, two-thirds of the people that took part in the survey thought that they would manage to pay off mortgages before retiring.

The ERC is stating that this is leading to more people looking at the later life market for ways around the problem. One out of every three survey respondents said that equity release would help their post-retirement financial circumstances.

Jim Boyd, the CEO of the ERC told Mortgage Strategy that:

“We need to recognise we are in a new era where the goal of becoming mortgage free will, for some people, be less important than the practical need to access property wealth in later life.”

Those with the CeMAP qualification may want to supplement it with an additional CeRER qualification to access that market.