Mortgage Question from an "Oldie"

[Turtle Shed]

Me and Mrs Shed own our home, both of us are approaching 60. Current house is paid for, and we both have final salary pensions. We have one son but he has already had his inheritance in the form of gifted money to help him buy his own home. (Anything else he gets is a bonus, he expects and wants nothing more).

We are thinking of taking on a mortgage again to upsize, buying a place in which we expect to live out our days. Loan to value ratio would be 20% at most. (Barclays have already given an agreement in principal for a standard repayment mortgage at the sort of figure we're after)

My question is: What are the downsides of taking out what would be an easily affordable interest-only mortage and paying it for the rest of our lives? I know we would never own the home outright, not sure it matters.

Affodability is not an issue, we both still work part-time self-employed and will probably do so for a few more years. State pension will also kick in as well.

There are things like needing long term-care, but frankly at 59 and 58 years old respectively we're ignoring that.

Will be disussing with our IFA on Monday, he'll have some thoughts, but there are sharp minds on here who I suspect will come up with "Ah, what you haven't considered is...."

Thanks all.

[TwigtheWonderkid]

No downsides. Makes perfect sense. Just pay the interest. Hopefully house will increase in value over the years so the 20% LTV becomes 10% or 5% in time. In years to come, sell up, pay off the mortgage lump sum, and you have 80%+ of the value to buy something smaller. Or die, and your son sells, pays off the mortgage and has the rest for himself. Here's a link to a Legal and General product that seems to do what you want.

https://www.legalandgeneral.com/retirement/retirem...

[Turtle Shed]

Cool, thanks.

Very helpful to know the name of the product too :-)