Coalition Considers Letting Home Buyers Put Their Actual Retirement Up As Collateral
Under the revised proposal, missed mortgage payments would be settled not in dollars but in years, with banks repossessing borrowers' sixties, seventies, or however much retirement is left on the account.
Housing spokesman Andrew Bragg's plan to let superannuation back home loans has reportedly been refined overnight into a scheme in which the collateral is not the super balance itself but the retirement it was meant to fund. Under the revised structure, a borrower who falls behind on repayments would simply have a portion of their retirement repossessed by the lender, to be held on the bank's books until the debt is considered settled.
"We came together as one house, deferred," said a spokesperson for the working group, before excusing themselves to attend a briefing on how many retirement years currently sit as unclaimed collateral in bank vaults nationwide.
Early modelling suggests the scheme would be popular with lenders, who have reportedly expressed interest in bundling repossessed retirements into a single pool that could be resold to other borrowers still a few decades away from needing theirs. Financial advisers are said to be recommending clients keep at least one full decade of retirement unmortgaged, just in case.
Asked whether this represented a shift from the housing debates of the 1980s and 90s that produced the original super guarantee, the working group said it preferred to think of it as calibrating the retirement and housing systems so thoroughly that the two systems simply become each other.