Lifetime Home Q&A

We keep a limited number of agreements available for cross-lease and unit title properties. We recommend getting in touch if your home is one of these and you’re looking to complete in 2025.

There are three key mechanisms in place to protect you if something happens to Lifetime Home Limited:

• Bare Trust protection: Your agreement with Lifetime Home Limited is held in a bare trust supervised by the Public Trust. If something happens to Lifetime Home Limited, the Public Trust will oversee the agreement and ensure it is fulfilled according to its terms and conditions for the remaining duration.
• Payment continuity: If something happens to Lifetime Home Limited and you are still entitled to payments, your income payments will continue uninterrupted. This is because the funds for each agreement are pre-committed and secured before the agreement is signed.
• 90-day cooling-off clause: You have a 90-day cooling-off period after signing the agreement, during which you can cancel without penalty or financial loss. This provides an extra layer of protection and flexibility, allowing you to withdraw if circumstances change or if any concerns arise early on, including potential issues with Lifetime Home Limited.

Short answer no. If you sell, pass away, or want to buy back the portion of equity Lifetime Home has exchanged, then you simply send us a request.

Lifetime Home Limited will only own the portion of equity it has accrued over the period the agreement has been in place. For instance, after one year, Lifetime Home Limited will only own 3.5% of equity to be paid back.

Equally there is a 90 day cool down clause which allows you to cease the agreement within this timeframe with no penalties.

Lifetime Home offers absolute certainty over the amount of equity exchanged for payments. That means each fortnightly payment accumulates an agreed amount of equity and at the end of the ten-year period when your payments stop, so too does the accumulating equity. If you choose to stay in your home past ten years, then the equity is fixed at the agreed amount, which is typically 35%.

If you choose to request an additional agreement after ten years, you could receive further payments for up to five years. In this instance, we will outline the additional equity you will exchange for payments. Typically, this would be an extra 15%, taking Lifetime Home Limited’s initial 35% to 50%.

What does this mean? You know with certainty how much of your home’s equity you will own at any one time, unlike a reverse mortgage, which cannot guarantee what the interest rate will be over time and therefore how much equity you’ll retain in your home in the future.

At ten years the payments stop, as does the payment for equity exchange. You then can remain in your home as long as you are able to.

You can then request an additional agreement that will give you up to a further five years of payments for an agreed fixed equity exchange.

We are proud of this award-winning product, and are happy to share these independent reviews:

• Money Hub – Independent review (Click to View)
• TMM – Jenny Ruth investigates (Click to View)
• Equity Release – Independent NZ website (Click to View)

If you have decided that you want to proceed with Lifetime Home, the next step is to get a registered valuation. The team is happy to help attain quotes and organise a date and time.

The homeowner bears the cost of the valuation. Note, the homeowner is not obliged to proceed with an agreement following a valuation.