Reverse Mortgage in Hawaii with Wendy Oshiro

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Interview Transcription

ADRIENNE:
Welcome back. And thanks for listening to the Team Lally Real Estate show home of the guaranteed sold program or we’ll buy it. I’m Adrienne. And I’m Attilio. And if you have any questions, just give us a call at 7999596 or check us out online at Teamlally.com.

ATTILIO:
By the way, we want to send a special thank you to the person who invented the zero. Yes, thanks for nothing.

ADRIENNE:
Okay, so our guest today graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in education. She was a high school math teacher for 16 years until her own family’s experience led her on a mission to educate others about reverse mortgages. Are you going to do the second part? Are you going to keep looking?

ATTILIO:
Go ahead. No, I was caught up with these dad jokes. Okay.

ADRIENNE:
Since 2007, she has focused on educating kupuna, their Ohana and professionals about reverse mortgage programs. She currently is a branch manager and a certified reverse mortgage professional for Mutual of Omaha Reverse Mortgage. Please welcome obviously welcome back. Our guest Wendy Oshiro.

ATTILIO:
Welcome, Wendy.

WENDY:
Hey, Aloha,

ATTILIO:
thanks for being on the radio show. So you’d like to hit me? Yeah, thank you so much. We’d like to hit them high hit them low, like like a linebacker with with the beginning of our guests coming on the show. So right off the bat, people hear reverse mortgage. And

ADRIENNE:
let’s just say like, what is it first? Yeah,

ATTILIO:
they don’t like what is that? What is that? What is that? Can you tell us what a reverse mortgage is?

WENDY:
Sure. It’s a loan. That’s a special loan for retirees or older homeowners. That allows them to use a portion of the equity in their home for as long as they remain in the house and pay their property charges on time. But the use of the equity allows them to be able to either increase their cash flow or pay off you know, existing mortgages, allows them to fund their retirement and they don’t have to worry about making a principal or interest payment for as long as they do those things I mentioned earlier.

ATTILIO:
Yeah, there’s a mortgage company send anybody by to check if they’ve cleaned the gutters or if they vacuum last week?

WENDY:
No, but they do check on occupancy and the way that of occupancy certificates and make sure that the homeowner’s still there.

ADRIENNE:
Now, Wendy, we were talking earlier, and you had given us a list of reasons why people had done reverse mortgages with you just in the last few months, like real life. Yeah, real life reasons. So let’s share that with our listeners. Yes.

WENDY:
All right, I don’t have the list in front of me. So let me go from memory. So we’ve had people who actually were at risk of foreclosure, they have not kept up with their mortgage payments. And so we were able to help them stay in their home. We’ve had people who inherited a house, and needed to buy out their siblings in order to continue to live in the home. We’ve had people unfortunately, who’ve divorced and needed a solution in order for one of them to stay in the house while you know, buying out the other I guess you would say, and then we’ve had people purchase property using a reverse mortgage, including primary residence is not just an investment property. Yeah. But also new homes where they could just retire in place.

ATTILIO:
And he had my favorite was, we got we get we tired asking the kids for money.

WENDY:
Oh, yeah, that was independent. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

ADRIENNE:
And then needing like money for some upgrades in the house, and to do some upkeep or like aging in place. I think that was another one that you had mentioned. Yeah. You guys

WENDY:
are listening very well. Thank you. Your long term care, repairs to the home. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

ATTILIO:
I think the common theme there do is that and you learn this, and I want you to share your personal experience, because I think it’s important for people to understand from an emotional personal situation, why you got involved with this, and why your trusted should be trusted at the highest level is that personal experience. But think about every, think about ourselves, where you want to be in your end of days, I want to be on a beach, I want to be in my home. I want to be on my home where I’ve you know, lived for a long, long time and being comfortable, right, surrounded by your family. And so that’s the main main thing that helps people with a reverse mortgage, but talk about your personal experience.

WENDY:
Well, that’s what my dad wanted. He had built his home overlooking Pearl Harbor. He and his friend built it about 30 years before he had his stroke. And one year later, my mom had her aneurysm and they both were incapacitated, they had to receive 24/7 Care for a time. But my dad really wanted to go from the facility that he was in with mom and move back home. I just thought the worst that reverse mortgages based on, you know what I heard? Not the facts, just what was the myths that were out there. And I decided I didn’t even want to look at it. I didn’t want to consider it at all. I ended up selling my parents house and basically ended their dreams of ever moving back home. And so I found out about the reverse mortgage after and I learned that it could have helped them to remain in the home and afford the care that they needed. You know, the sad thing was my dad told me said Wendy, you know, they say that when catastrophic health issues happen like this. I only have long term care for three years for a reason. He said, he was told that, you know, most people don’t need it after that time. And, yeah, he died three years later, and I could have used the reverse mortgage to keep him in his home. So that’s why I’m out there educating people to let them know quality of life is an issue that we really need to consider when we’re taking care of our loved ones. And to ensure that we explore all the different solutions out there to make the best decision for them.

ATTILIO:
And, you know, we talked, we shared four powerful statements at the beginning of the show and the one that comes to mind in this situation. And for people out there that are thinking they know what a reverse mortgage is. The actual truth of the statement should be I don’t understand.

ADRIENNE:
Yes. So let’s, let’s go into that. Wendy, I know that you had heard some, you know, untrue information, like what kind of myths are out there?

ATTILIO:
Let’s bust the top three myths.

WENDY:
I heard or I understood that someone was going to take my house, my parents house away. You know, that’s what I thought. Yeah, and I thought the bank or the lender would take title to the property. And that’s untrue. It’s basically the same as when you get a traditional mortgage, the lender will put a lien on the property because that’s their collateral, but they don’t take ownership of it. There are requirements or things that we have to do to make sure that we don’t lose the home to foreclosure. And that’s basically paying property taxes and homeowners insurance and any other property charges. But, you know, that doesn’t happen. And that’s the number one myth, people think that the lender is going to take the house away. Not true. And there’s also other myths out there as well, which I can go over if we have time. But

ATTILIO:
the ones that are gonna take the house away, what’s what’s, what’s another big one that comes up all the time?

WENDY:
That it’s for, that it’s for people in financial hardship. Yeah. And that’s so not true. Like we we have people that are wealthy that are getting the reverse mortgage to leverage their equity and accomplish their financial goals for retirement. It’s not as it’s not just for the cash strapped, you know, people are using it to live a better retirement.

ADRIENNE:
It’s a strategy. So like, you can have different strategies. And if you’re, what 62 or older, the reverse mortgage strategy might be the smartest way to leverage. So they reach out to the word. Yeah,

ATTILIO:
I know, there’s a reminder, the word that, yeah, no, go ahead. Wendy.

WENDY:
The word I know that I like the word strategy, because that in order to do a strategy, you need to be informed. And that’s still thing about reverse mortgages, if people don’t understand it, and they just kind of, you know, just leave it at that. But if you learn about how it works, and you learn how you can use it, then you start to develop strategies that will help you live a better retirement.

ATTILIO:
I think it’s important to note too, that when you sit down, you know, we’re realtors, and a lot of myths that that well. And it could be true in some circumstances, but certainly not in Team Lally, or Adrienne or Attilio circumstances when we’re doing sales is that we go through all the options, and we find if we see someone that’s a senior, and their objective is to stay in the home, we’re gonna say, Well, have you thought of a reverse mortgage? Most likely say, Well, what is that?

ADRIENNE:
And then we’ll connect them with Wendy

ATTILIO:
Well, I heard this or I heard that, because it’s about the relationship and not about making money.

ADRIENNE:
Now, like one other thing on the strategy that Wendy and I were talking the other day, and she reminded me that you can really use this reverse mortgage it to purchase and, Wendy, if you could just share your the example of the client that you were able to help and the difference is a reverse mortgage made in their ability to purchase your I’ll be helpful.

WENDY:
Yes. All right. So we’re getting a lot of inquiries right now from people on the mainland who want to move back home. They want to retire back in Hawaii. And so they know, one of them in particular that I’m thinking of right now, she had a large, large sum of cash that she thought she could do a cash purchase with. It was about $700,000. And she wanted to live in Kaahala which is actually the it’s quite

ADRIENNE:
I don’t think that even exists.

WENDY:
At Yeah, 700,000 very slim chance of finding something that you’d like there. So with the reverse mortgage, she was able to get reverse mortgage financing to purchase a home that was over a million. And that, you know, having that power or the ability to upsize was so helpful for her to find the home that she just loved. Yeah,

ATTILIO:
and, and maybe not and not necessarily upsize in physical square foot, but upsizing the price point that you need to be in to be in the neighborhood you want, right? Yep. So I think it’d be right. And you helped her because her objective was I don’t want to have mortgage payments. I don’t want to be worrying about a monthly big bill that I got to take care of. And you helped her get into the neighborhood that she wanted to be in, she’s not going to have mortgage payments, and it’s

ADRIENNE:
a win win, win win.

WENDY:
Right? Yeah. So in summary, yeah. Yeah, so it does help homebuyers to increase their purchasing power by at least a third and not have to worry about making principal or interest payments back to the lender after that. So you know, it’s something important for 62 year old and over to consider when looking at a traditional mortgage, you know, is that the right way to go? We’re have to make payments every month. You know, sometimes people only have Social Security, and it’ll take up a lot of that, you know, when you’re when you have have a mortgage. But with a reverse, it can help you to afford the house that you want to live in, and not affect your cash flow so much. You know, so, so good

ADRIENNE:
to look at when do you mentioned 62? Is that minimum age? What other requirements are needed for like either the reverse mortgage purchase or just to get the reverse mortgage on your current home or residence? Anything else that our listeners need to be aware of? So as a credit to income? Yeah,

WENDY:
right, right. So it’s an owner occupant loan, so you must occupy the property and or intend to occupy the property, like when you’re purchasing a home, right, you’re going to intend to move and live in there. And then you also must be very good about paying your property charges, right, your taxes and insurance, and HOA if there is any maintenance fees, very, very important. And, and then for the process, we actually do look at credit history, and we look at income, because we want to make sure that our borrowers can’t afford to remain in the hole for a long period of time. So there is some qualification process pre qualification that we have to go through. But you know, everybody’s different. And we just have to have a conversation and make sure we understand the goals of our borrower and collect that important income assets and credit history information. You know, so that’s how we would determine if, if it’s a option for them.

ATTILIO:
So your and your initial consultation is $10,000 for one hour? No, no, no, it’s free. You know, what the rumor is that I want to spread that it’s free. All you got to do is call up, you know, sometimes you got to grab people’s attention, because you, you see it free, and they kind of just tune out. Because everybody says, so that’s why I did some reverse psychology on our listeners right now. They’re like, Oh, it’s not 10,000. Okay, it’s free. Okay, I should call get educated us more expensive, not knowing.

ADRIENNE:
So. So Wendy you had mentioned that, in one of the situations that these clients were facing foreclosure? Yeah. And you were able to keep them in their home. So obviously, if someone is in that position, and maybe their credit isn’t so great. How does that work? If there are payments? Yeah, what if someone’s behind, but they’ve got a lot of equity, and they really want to stay in their home? Is there like, a special exception? How to like, yeah, how does that work? How do you help them?

WENDY:
So for someone who was in foreclosure, okay, so the reverse mortgage, the financial assessment portion, I think, is very different from a traditional mortgage. With traditional mortgages, we, the lender has to look at the ability for the borrower to pay a mortgage every month. For us, on the reverse side, we’re looking at their income to determine if they can afford their living expenses, which is very different. And so even though people are in foreclosure, and they have like, you know, 650, credit scores, or whatever it is, we don’t look at the we don’t even look at the credit score, we just look at, we have to be able to answer the question, can they live in their home, even with the reverse mortgage? Right? So being able to afford the basic, the basics on their income? So it is possible and not in the same way? You know, like, we don’t look at the same requirements as a traditional lender would. Yeah. So it every situation is unique. And it’s very different for some people in foreclosure, we can’t do it, and some we can. So it’s important to have a conversation with me or my team, and then we can determine that for them.

ADRIENNE:
So Wendy what would be a good number for our listeners to call to or an email, give us some good contact info that people can reach out directly to you on?

WENDY:
The best way, I think is to have a conversation. And so you can contact me on my, my cell phone and it’s 808-753-9819 Some people don’t want to have that conversation because they’re a little nervous about the discussion. So email is fine, too is and that would be at woshiro@mutualmortgage.com.

ATTILIO:
So the phone number is 7539819, 7539819 goes to sushi Ronnie. Oh, her pen just ran out of ink. I’m gonna say one more time. 7539819 You know, and some people are like, ah, emails, like just talk story. Just have a conversation with Wendy and see

ADRIENNE:
what kind of strategy would work and I can see firsthand Wendy is going to tell you what’s in your best interest.

ATTILIO:
Let’s talk about that stuff. Energy, why it’s important to involve the children? Why is it important to involve the children in the conversation?

WENDY:
Because the children if they don’t understand what the parents are doing, sometimes the parents give them enough power to stop the loan from happening. Yeah, you know, if they don’t understand, they’re gonna and there’s they were like me, right, I didn’t understand it. I said no way to a reverse mortgage for my parents, they can see the same thing for for the senior. Yeah. So it’s important to get everybody involved, so everyone can have a good understanding of how it benefits, you know, their loved one and be on board and support them instead of, you know, derailing their plans.

ATTILIO:
Yeah, cuz that’s what you I mean, knowing what you know, today, you would have done it differently for your dad. Yeah.

WENDY:
Yeah, I would.

ADRIENNE:
And then with with Wendy coming from that educator background, and then having her own personal experience, yeah. She’s also educating, you know, realtors and other professionals about their reverse mortgage, we get to earn, you know, see ease from her. And yeah,

ATTILIO:
sometimes the kids, you know, we got to talk about it, the most popular radio station in the world is WIFM, and what does that stand for? What’s in it for me? What’s in it for me? And we all, you know, have this little bit of self interest, and the kids are like, oh, there goes my inheritance. That’s not true. And and, yeah, that’s one that’s not true. And number two, you know, good. A good child to the parent, you know, it’s like my dad, I said, Dad, you want to blow it all and go chipper on the road, go for it, you earned it, you paid for it. It’s your dealio. Don’t worry about us, the best thing you did for us was role model what it takes to to to work hard and get what you want. So hopefully, all the kids are like that.

ADRIENNE:
But you know, they’re not. Yeah. And then Wendy has to come in and educate,

ATTILIO:
educate them and educate the family, let’s do the right thing for mom and dad to do the right thing,

ADRIENNE:
do the right thing and call Wendy just have a conversation.

ATTILIO:
We want to stay in the home when he’s going to help them with that goal.

WENDY:
Any other please call me

ATTILIO:
7539819? I think she just found a pen 7539819.

ADRIENNE:
Well, thank you, Wendy, for being on the show. If there’s an Is there anything else that we did not touch on that we should have? Before we let you go?

WENDY:
Oh, yeah, there’s probably a lot. So if anybody has questions about their particular situation, or scenario, just call because we can’t cover everything in you know, 15-20 minutes?

ATTILIO:
Yeah. So I would just for the listener, write down your questions. So you have a more efficient, effective conversation with Wendy, write down your concerns, write down what you think might be some myths or about it and don’t Google it, you know, talk to an expert in the field. That’s, that’s going to have your best interests in mind. Because when that’s here locally, I tell you, anytime you do anything, half the stuff is baloney. Was 1/3 of the stuff is baloney. 1/3 of the stuff is negative and 1/3 of the stuff is positive, and you don’t know which one is which. That’s the challenge. Right, so

ADRIENNE:
Well, thank Thank you, Wendy, for being our guest and coming back and for being so helpful to our clients by

WENDY:
providing a little thank you, Adrienne and thanks Attilio. Always a pleasure to be here.

ATTILIO:
Thank you. And yeah, sure. We’ll have you on again. Yes.

WENDY:
All right. Thank you.

ATTILIO:
All right, bye. Well, that was Wendy Oshiro. She does reverse mortgages. If you want to get a hold of her, just you know, you can give us a call 7999596 Just go to Teamlally.com. You can we have an email, it’s info@teamlally.com. And you say I want to know more about reverse mortgages. And we contact will point you in the right direction. So again, we’ve got a career night coming up, April 3rd,

ADRIENNE:
on Monday, five to six, five to six and join us on Zoom completely. Hawaiicareernight.com I want to share before our show, and I’m gonna share a review go ahead from Eric shoots. We’re currently working with Shalay she has helped us immensely with her experience and knowledge of the local communities over the past six months. And we look forward to closing on our new house soon. Good job Shalay. With your assistance.

ATTILIO:
We are currently working with Shalay. Cool. So we say we, when we’re happy with Shalay, we say Shalay but we’re always happy with her. So that’s how we always say it.

ADRIENNE:
That’s great. All right. All right. So I’m about four minutes left.

ATTILIO:
What else do you want to share with our listeners valuable listeners our important listeners.

ADRIENNE:
Well, one thing I want to remind our listeners about is that we generally will have anywhere between 10 to 15 Coming Soon listings in our inventory, and those have not hit the market yet. They’re just in different phases of preparation. And like Dan was talking about, like there’s, you know, the sales are down because inventory is down, people are holding on, people still want to buy holding on to their homes with those low interest rates. Yeah. But we’ve got, we’ve got some insider information. Coming soon listings,

ATTILIO:
we’ve got coming soon listings because people are in any kind of different states of preparation or getting their homes ready or getting some kind of paperwork all squared away, or getting all the parties on board. And so whatever that may be, here’s how we get how you get how you get your VIP access to that come to a buyer consultation with us. Just give us a call, give us a call. We’re gonna put you in a headlock make you sign some paperwork. No, take your wallet. No, we’re not gonna do any of that stuff. All we’re gonna do is get you educated, just have a conversation, not going to sign anything, don’t spend any money. You know, if you are committed, we ask you to sign a buyer’s rep agreement and you know, it’s one one page all in English simple. Talking about the obligation to see if you had a one page document with your kids. Okay, number one, you can clean your

ADRIENNE:
room. I do have those documents with my kid number two, you’re gonna always sign it. Put the lid

ATTILIO:
down. And number three, double flush the floaters. Okay, we don’t mommy don’t like seeing that. What about the dishes dishes, put them away. They don’t put themselves away just have a wrapper. Imagine you have a document explaining the contents. The relationship makes things less drama and they got a sign for it. Yeah.

ADRIENNE:
All right. Yeah. So we’re going to talk about open houses. We got lots of open houses. On Saturday and on Sunday,

ATTILIO:
this is one it’s not an open house yet schedule a visit but it’s Estateoahu.com It’s our $25 million estate. Thank you so estateoahu.com have my glasses on sorry, I can’t even read my own business card. promotional material estateoahu.com 25,000,000, 23 and a half acres backed up against the Ko’olau’s all water supply PV five storey elevator, infinity edge pool.

ADRIENNE:
Whoo. There’s no other property like this in the state of Hawaii. Nowhere we did the research. This is it. That’s it. All right opportunity.

ATTILIO:
And we’re always looking for team members to go to JoinTeamlally.com before we wrap it up. That’s join Team lally.com Thank you for listening and thank you to our sponsors.

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