> It's not a "reverse" mortgage; it's just a mortgage that the lender doesn't expect you to pay off (so when you die, they get a stake in the your estate). In

> It's not a "reverse" mortgage; it's just a mortgage that the lender doesn't expect you to pay off (so when you die, they get a stake in the your estate). In the US it's commonly called a reverse mortgage. > I've thought a good bit about equity-release; I might be forced into it, if my health holds out longer than I've planned for. But I was taught never to use capital for current expenditure. I try to stick to that. > Thing is, it seems wrong to tax the property of someone whose only income is rental from that same property. The only way they can pay the tax is to reduce their stake in the property, and so their ability to pay tax. It's a spiral that ends in disappropriation, and dependence on the state. Sure I agree that you ideally don't want to draw down on your capital, but ideally you'd have the cash to pay the taxes. Going back to the case of equities, if your only income was in the form of dividends and you didn't have enough to pay taxes you owe, you'd need to sell stocks which would decrease future cash flow from dividends. I don't really see this as fundamentally different than other cases where you don't have enough income to grow your wealth after costs. E.g. when you go in to retirement. I mean it's nice if you have enough capital that you can fully live of off cash you derive from it (rentals, dividends, pensions, etc.), but if you can't then you gotta dip into your capital.