What about life before the Equity Release Calculator?

The growing popularity of equity release schemes has driven a sea of change in the world of retirement mortgages. For one, increases in demand from customers has led to more flexible, innovative and secure equity release solutions being developed all the time. As more and more players enter the market, there has also been an increase in the number of comparison and information websites whom themselves are innovating to provide new tools to help in conducting equity release research.

One of these latest tools is the equity release calculator which was once a novel tool offered only by pioneering websites like Equity Release Supermarket. Today however, the equity release calculator has become a common sight and very common across the marketplace.

What is an equity release calculator?

An equity release calculator is a highly useful application as it allows users to get a fairly good idea of how much you can borrow from the whole of the equity release market. Useful as it is, though, it is a fairly recent development. Prior to the availability of this simple tool, the only way for potential clients to find out the maximum release available on any particular plan would be to contact the equity release provider either by phone, or in person!

This seemed like an awfully tedious way to find out something that could be calculated rather quickly based on a few simple facts. Companies like Equity Release Supermarket therefore invested in a simple application that, once users entered certain basic facts such as age and property value, could calculate maximum borrowing based on a simple algorithm used by equity release companies to calculate borrowing. This application provided the client with the equity release calculation upon which they could base their spending plans.

Today, numerous websites have an equity release calculator. While this is a good thing that enables users to quickly find out maximum borrowing, equity release calculators are now also being used as a form of marketing or advertising to attract potential customers by only promoting certain equity release plans over others. The point of an equity release calculator is to provide a functional and entirely unbiased tool for users to work out the maximum average amount they could release. And the role of equity release comparison websites is to provide impartial information and objective advice about the different options available.

Using an equity release calculator as a marketing ploy seems not only to compromise the ethics behind providing impartial advice and information on websites, but also undermines the entire point of offering such a calculation application to users.

Nevertheless, the fact is that the equity release calculator offered by reputable comparison sites has provided a hassle free and quick way for users to calculate maximum borrowing from an equity release plan. This can form part of the initial equity release research into lifetime mortgage schemes and act as an in-road into preliminary discussions with your lifetime mortgage adviser.

For further information on how to calculate the maximum equity release lump sum call the Equity Release Supermarket lifetime mortgage department on Freephone 0800 678 5159.