A reverse mortgage is a loan against your home where you don’t have to make mortgage payments.  The lender gives you a lump sum or regular payments that are limited to a percentage of your home’s value, typically 20-60% depending on your age, and you get to stay in your home.  The mortgage balance grows until you die, leave your home for some other reason, or choose to pay it off. In a typical case, you or your estate pays back the lender from the proceeds of selling your home.  For most reverse mortgages, you get to stay in your home even if the debt grows to more than the home’s value.  The best information I could find is that this happens less than 1% of the time, which is hardly surprising given the extended real estate boom in Canada. House prices have been appreciating fast enough to keep ahead of the debt. The number of reverse mortgages held by Canadians is still just a tiny fraction of all mortgages, and even fewer reverse mortgages have run to completion....