How Darlene kept the Palm Springs condo.

Darlene and her husband had a home in an exclusive neighborhood in Orange County, the kind with a gate around it and a guard who checks on visitors. They also had a condo in Palm Springs the family had used their entire adult lives for vacations and fun trips. She loved life and her kids.

Then it happened. She lost her husband, and it tore her apart emotionally and financially. Income wise, her husband's Social Security payment stayed because it was larger, but she lost her own income entirely. She still had a mortgage on the home behind the large walls and a smaller loan on the condo in Palm Springs, totaling $3,200 a month.

She was in one of those life moments many of us are not prepared for, even though we know it is inevitable. She was facing a dilemma: sell the Palm Springs condo and use the money to make payments on her home. She was devastated, because she loved that condo. It held a million memories and brought the family together all the time. Her cash flow had been squeezed to a dribble.

She came to one of my seminars and sat sheepishly in the back, as a lot of toe dippers do. I explained that a reverse mortgage is just a mortgage. There are no trap doors, no secret handshakes, and nothing you can't understand or verify. HECM reverse mortgages were created by Congress, are regulated by HUD, and are insured by the FHA, with protections written in for the homeowner.

For millions of retirees, they are one of the only practical ways to access the equity in a home, because income drops and expenses rise as you get older. It is hard to income qualify for a HELOC or a second mortgage at that stage. Too often, the only other way to get at the money is to sell the home.

So I told her I have a list of Ambassadors, people who have done a reverse mortgage, who would speak to her about anything.

She asked me to call her after the seminar, and she explained her hesitations. She spouted the usual suspects: the nonsense about losing your home, or that her friend's mom's sister had one and it was bad. The misinformation about reverse mortgages in this country is tragic, and a lot of people suffer because of it.

I have learned it isn't what I say that matters. It is what they believe. So I gave her five people to call, and she called every one of them. She even told me about the ones who talked her ear off, and I just laughed, because she could talk without taking a breath for hours herself.

In the end, she used a HECM on her home to pay off her current mortgage, satisfy the condo loan, and set up a line of credit as a safety net for the future. She killed three birds with one stone. She now enjoys having no required monthly mortgage payment, keeps that extra $3,200 a month in her bank account, and receives the Social Security check in full. She is ready for the next chapter in life, and she feels great.

Guess what. You can too.