Description
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Home Equity and Ageing Owners: Between Risk and Regulation by Lorna Fox OMahony
The growing use of housing equity to support a range of health and welfare needs raises complex issues particularly when it is older owners who are being asked to choose from a complex and bewildering range of options. Transactions which facilitate the use of home equity as a resource to spend in later life - from trading down and ordinary secured and unsecured debt to targeted products including reverse/lifetime mortgages home reversion plans and sale-and-rentback agreements - raise important legal and regulatory issues. This book provides a contextual analysis of the financial transactions that older people enter into using their housing equity. It traces the protections afforded to older owners through the ordinary law of property and contract as well as the development of specific regulatory protections focused on targeted products. The book employs the notion of risk to highlight the nature and causes of the situational vulnerabilities to which older people are now subject as consumers of housing equity showing that the older owners personal situation is crucial in determining whether and why they may seek to release equity the options and products available to them and the impact of harms resulting from adverse transactions.