Roll up and Other Misconceptions

Pete Matthew of Meaningfulmoney has an interesting series of videos on equity release. The one that caught my eye was this published on 24 Aug 2011. He writes,

One of the main concerns for those contemplating Equity Release is that the interest building up so fast, there’ll be no equity left in their home to leave to the kids. Here, I show that it’s really not as bad as all that by looking at some realistic examples.

He then goes through the mechanics of the hare vs. tortoise race between rolled up loan amount and house prices. He also gives examples based on an example case in which there is a house worth £200k, an ERM loan of £50k, a loan rate of 7% and an hpi of 3%, with discrete annual compounding.

His results for the Lifetime Mortgage case are shown in the following screenshot:

The key finding is that it takes an awfully long time for the house price to overtake the loan amount and push the loan into negative equity.

That might not be the whole picture, however.

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Discounting by risk free

“As a way to commit crimes without interference from Batman, the Penguin once recruited an unnamed actuary. This actuary observed that the best way to commit a crime without being foiled by Batman was to do so in broad daylight”.
http://batmanytb.com/Actuary%20(Comics)

As I commented the other day, life insurers have for a long time used arbitrary methods of discounting insurance obligations. The idea permeates actuarial culture and most actuaries, including even the younger actuaries who qualified under the new actuarial syllabus designed to drag actuarial valuation into the 1950s, show surprise when you suggest that this is completely wrong.
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Casting magic upon daylight

A spokesman for UKAR got back to me saying I got the numbers wrong in this post. I said that the total loan value of the book bought by Rothesay Life, i.e. the original amount lent accrued at the loan rate is somewhat north of £1bn. Apparently not, for that value, which they call ‘unpaid balances on portfolios sold’, is £860m, hence somewhat south of £1bn. So there are five different values to choose from:

  • The loan value (i.e. original amount lent accrued at the loan rate) £860m
  • The book value of c. £750m
  • The amount that would have been paid if not for the NNEG
  • The amount paid by Rothesay, which UKAR cannot disclose, but which was greater than book value, and £200m less than the amount that would have been paid if not for the NNEG
  • Government loan repayment: over £1bn

Fans of linear algebra will spot that there are still too many unknown quantities to make any sense of this.

Continue reading “Casting magic upon daylight”