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The qualifying age for such an arrangement is 55, but Ranson said the bank’s average client would be in their early seventies. He added between 30 and 40 per cent of the business comes from people paying off debt such as a conventional mortgage or money owing on a line of credit.

Occasionally, home equity is even being tapped to pay off credit card bills, he said, adding that his team had heard from seniors that they are turning to reverse mortgages because new federal stress tests make it tough to secure a line of credit against their homes.

While some might be troubled by the trend that has seniors financing their lives by eating into assets that typically would have been left to children by an earlier generation, the boom has resulted in HomeEquity Bank racking up a portfolio of about $4 billion in reverse mortgage loans.

The lender dipped a toe in selling a bundle of reverse mortgages to another financial institution last year — $75 million worth — to generate funds to make even more loans.

Ranson said he intends to arrange a larger transaction in the first half of this year to continue to feed demand, which he hopes will help originate at least $900 million in new reverse mortgages in 2020.

The aging population’s growing appetite for using home equity to finance their cash and debt needs is borne out by recent figures from the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, which show that reverse mortgages came close to tripling over the past five years. Reverse mortgages in Canada stood at $3.92 billion as of October, up from $1.35 billion in the same month of 2014.