A recent AARP-sponsored seminar on caregiving featured a lineup of prominent speakers including novelist Walter Mosley and author Gail Sheehy, who discussed their personal experiences caring for aging loved ones. The issue of compensation for family members who must quit or take leave from their jobs to provide significant care to their aging relatives was a hot topic of conversation. After listening to the discussion, it occurred to me that reverse mortgages can be part of the solution for those looking to provide funding to family providing long-term care to relatives.

Long-term care is a part of the rapidly expanding aging-in-place movement in which seniors, who in previous eras might have spent years in nursing facilities or hospitals, remain in their homes and communities for the balance of life. Services once provided by medical-facility staffers are now available from a growing national network of in-home service providers including medical professionals and nurses, geriatric-care managers, transportation services, food-delivery companies, geriatric-home renovators and many more. These services can generally be found through your local Agency on Aging or through the National Aging in Place Council (www.ageinplace.org) which has local chapters in many major cities. Both organizations strive to provide one-stop shopping for any service a senior may need to be comfortable at home.

Long-term care, often defined as assistance with everyday tasks such as getting out of bed, bathing and dressing, is a topic most people avoid until they are forced to face it. Although a daunting two-thirds of all American seniors need long-term care, only 7 million Americans now carry long-term-care insurance. In comparison, 250 million Americans currently carry health insurance. Congress and the Obama administration attempted to create a new program to help bridge this gap in the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress, but revised budget figures showed the program might be economically unsustainable and thus politically unviable in the current deficit-obsessed environment.

Many seniors are more comfortable with a child or relative performing the intimate tasks required of long-term care than a virtual stranger. But families must also be able to survive the lost wages of a family member leaving the workforce to care for an aging relative.

One suggestion that came up at the AARP event was permitting the usage of funds from Health Savings Accounts (HASs) for this care. The rules attached to HSAs, since their creation in 2003, have forbidden using tax-advantaged funds for long-term care. While this is a good idea, it would require legislation, and, as we all know, the chance of passing legislation in our currently divided Congress is a challenge.

Using reverse mortgages in this situation, however, would require no changes to the program at all. A borrower can utilize the proceeds from a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) in any way they so choose. This could be used to provide an adult child with a weekly salary to care for an elderly family member, compensating them for the salary they are foregoing, which is completely permissible. Reverse-mortgage borrowers can choose to take their HECM proceeds in the form of a line of credit and write a check against that line for any in-home care to whomever provides it. In fact, one of the primary motivations at HUD for creating the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage, the government-insured reverse-mortgage program, was to encourage aging-in-place rather than in medical facilities where the care costs generally run four to five times more. Everyone, from the politicians on down, knows that aging-in-place can save money for seniors as well as for our nation’s Medicare program.

By using a reverse mortgage in this fashion, some seniors may be able to overcome the common concern that they will be spending money that had been planned to be used as an inheritance. By using a reverse mortgage to pay a child or relative for providing long-term care, a senior is passing on the inheritance, on an accelerated schedule and at a time when it might even be more beneficial to their heirs.

For more information on reverse mortgages, click on www.reversemortgage.org.