Maybe Bernie Sanders already knows about this and is pissed off about it, but I only found out about it a couple of weeks ago. Apparently Tom Selleck has been peddling reverse mortgages on TV for American Advisors Group (AAG) for about a year now.
Not that I care if people know my actual age, but given the topic I have to tell you that I am not yet of age to qualify for a reverse mortgage. You have to have been born in 1955 or earlier to qualify.
That’s the kind of people reverse mortgage lenders prey on, including people from the “greatest generation.” People who’ve worked hard their whole lives so that they could pay off their home mortgages. There's got to be some way to squeeze some more money out of those people.
Financial columnists point out that there are a few people for whom a reverse mortgage is a good idea, right before they start explaining the pitfalls. Columnists like Marc Lichtenfeld writing for WealthyRetirement.com, whose enumeration of pitfalls I now summarize:
- Fees, lots of fees
- Your
heirs estate might still owe money after selling the home (Edit, June 17, 2017: This point is disputed in the comments. According to a booklet published by the AARP, “the lender, when seeking repayment of your loan, does not have legal recourse to anything other than your home’s value. The lender may not seek repayment from your income, your other assets, or your heirs.” Upon rereading Lichtenfeld’s column, I notice that he writes “When you pass away, your estate has up to a year to pay back the loan.”)
- The longer you live, the more interest piles up
Okay, not that many pitfalls, but they’re big pitfalls.
Let’s try to be fair, though. Maybe reverse mortgages make an easy punching bag, like medication for restless leg syndrome, which is an actual medical condition.
Maybe some young people just need a dose of military discipline rather than a prescription for a restless leg drug, just as some old people ought to look just a little harder before getting into a reverse mortgage.
But just because I can’t think of a situation in which a reverse mortgage is the best option doesn’t mean that it never is. I get the feeling that it’s being marketed much more aggressively than necessary, as was the case with restless leg medication.
The latest TV star to peddle reverse mortgages is Tom Selleck, most famous for Magnum, P.I., though I remember him more as Ivan Tiggs on Boston Legal. Currently he stars on Blue Bloods on CBS.
So Selleck is standing pensively in front of a really nice window in a big apartment high up in a city building, having a very serious conversation with you, the viewer. “I thought what you thought,” he says early on in his spiel. Then he turns around. “Just like you, I thought reverse mortgages had to have some kind of catch.”
And he reassures us that a reverse mortgage is “not a way for the bank to get your house.” It’s supposedly “a simple idea” that enables you to stay in your own house while utilizing your home’s equity.
In print just large enough to legible, the disclaimer comes on screen: “The borrower could be subject to foreclosure for reasons including failure to maintain the property, and to pay taxes and insurance.” How comforting.
After walking around the apartment for a little bit, he sits down and tells you that “a reverse mortgage from AAG can give you the retirement stability you’re looking for.” Notice how sincere and concerned he sounds, as if this is an issue that he has personally dealt with! He’s a great actor.
Gee, Tom, didn’t you save your Magnum, P.I. money? What about your Blue Bloods money? Or what about your AAG ad money? I somehow doubt Tom Selleck has reason to worry about his retirement.
Blue Bloods is a show that started airing on CBS back in 2010, and is still running. Like The Big Bang Theory, Blue Bloods is already airing reruns daily on another channel, ION Entertainment to be specific. I don’t know if the AAG ad is running on ION, but I know that it is running on Heroes & Icons (you can find a slightly longer version on YouTube, but I won’t give a link).
On Blue Bloods, Tom Selleck plays New York Police Commissioner Frank Reagan. That name already tells you a little something about the political slant of the show. Blue Bloods is a show that appeals to a mostly white audience, according to Slate.
Much like the recent protests across the nation, sparked by the high-profile deaths of several unarmed black men at the hands of police, [real life New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s] comparatively gentle acknowledgment of the well-documented racial disparities in the criminal justice system has been met with a troubling reaction from both the police and much of white America: that acknowledging systemic racism and asking for police accountability is unnecessary at best and treacherous—or even dangerous—at worst.
There’s a television show perfectly scripted to both cater to and reinforce this perspective: Blue Bloods, a CBS crime drama that revolves around the ruling family in New York City law enforcement. Blue Bloods is currently the most popular network television show on Friday nights—though you may be forgiven for having never heard of it, given that the median age of its viewers is older than 60.
… Despite the fact that they are one of the most powerful families in New York—and certainly the most powerful family in the NYPD—Blue Bloods insists on depicting them as salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar types who don’t get any special privileges. They’re just regular guys, really, and they have lots of their own problems too. It’s not easy being a Reagan!
… the cases that the Reagans encounter—especially the ripped-from-the-headlines ones about race and excessive force—offer constant reassurance that there are no true racial issues within the criminal justice system that can’t be solved by a speech about colorblindness or the steely resolve of Tom Selleck’s mustache.
Worse, Blue Bloods has a habit of depicting people who speak up against the police as malicious, manipulative, or deceptive—and a lot of those people happen to be minorities.
The Slate article I’m quoting from was written in 2014. The author, Laura Hudson, emphasizes that examples of the show's biased perspective are to be found in the second season, mentioning an episode that is scheduled to rerun on ION next week.
In Blue Bloods, accusations leveled at police by citizens are almost always revealed to be fraudulent, and concerns about racial bias are almost always manufactured, deceitful, or overblown.
… Even though it is largely a show about detectives, Blue Bloods is dedicated not to investigating but to soothing or diminishing the fears around issues like racial bias … Narratively, these easy outs are yet another convenient loophole of the system, one that allows the brave, upstanding Reagans to have their cake and eat it too: to stand up for their convictions about justice and equality, but never truly face injustice and inequality.
This show “is the perfect white-privilege lullaby.” The choice of Tom Selleck to peddle reverse mortgages is a clear signal that reverse mortgages are a scam aimed at older white Americans.
Of course the very wealthy (and the pretending to be very wealthy) will screw over anyone when there is a buck to be made, regardless of their race. It’s not that they’re colorblind, it’s that they target scams according to the race of the intended victim.