Your home is paid off. Your income is not going up. Your assessment, your insurance premium, and your electric bill all are. Here is an honest look at how Calvert County seniors can ease that squeeze, including one overlooked option most people have been taught to fear for reasons that stopped being true decades ago.
The short answer: If you are 62 or older in Calvert County, own your home outright or nearly so, and are struggling to cover property taxes and insurance, you have three paths worth examining in this order. First, apply for the property tax credits you may already qualify for, which cost you nothing. Second, look at whether selling and moving makes sense. Third, consider a reverse mortgage, which lets you convert home equity into cash, monthly income, or a line of credit while keeping the title and staying in your home, with no required monthly mortgage payment.
A reverse mortgage is not free money and it is not right for everyone. It is a federally insured loan with real obligations and real costs. What it is not is the trap most people believe it to be.
The squeeze in Calvert County is not in your head
Homeowners across Calvert County, from Prince Frederick and Lusby to Huntingtown, Owings, Dunkirk, St. Leonard, Solomons, Chesapeake Beach, and North Beach have watched the same thing happen from opposite directions. The house is worth dramatically more. The cost of keeping it has climbed right alongside.
Maryland reassesses property on a three-year rotating cycle. The state splits every county into three groups and reassesses one group each year, so your neighbor may be reassessed in a different year than you are.
The Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation reported that for the Calvert County properties reassessed in 2025, residential and commercial values rose 19.4 percent against their prior 2022 valuation. For the separate group reassessed in 2026, values rose 9.0 percent against their prior 2023 valuation.
Those are two different sets of properties, not the same homes assessed twice, so the figures do not add together. Your own increase may land higher or lower than either number. If the home is your principal residence, the Homestead Tax Credit also limits how quickly an increase shows up in the taxable assessment.
What is not in dispute is the direction. Values across the county have climbed substantially, and your tax bill follows the assessment. It does not follow your Social Security cost of living adjustment.
Electricity has moved in the same direction. As of August 1, 2026, Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative raised its residential Standard Offer Service base energy rate from about 10.57 cents to 12.48 cents per kilowatt hour in summer, and from about 10.60 cents to 13.19 cents in winter. That is roughly 18 percent on the summer base energy rate and 24 percent on the winter rate.
Read that carefully, because the distinction matters. Those percentages apply to the energy component of your bill, not to the total. Your bill also includes distribution and other charges that did not move by the same amount. The energy component is still a substantial portion of what most households pay, and it changed in a single step.
Add homeowners insurance, which has climbed sharply across the Chesapeake region as carriers reprice storm and wind exposure. Add groceries. Add the Medicare Part B premium and the prescriptions that come with getting older.
None of that is a personal failure. It is arithmetic. A fixed income meeting rising fixed costs produces exactly one result, and you are living in it.
Before you consider any loan, claim the relief you may already be owed
I am a loan officer. It would be easy for me to skip this section. I am putting it first because a meaningful number of Calvert County seniors are eligible for property tax relief they have never applied for, and no one should borrow against their home before exhausting the help that is free.
| Program | Who it is for | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| Maryland Homeowners’ Property Tax Credit | No age requirement. For the current program, combined gross household income cannot exceed 60,000 dollars. Net worth must be under 200,000 dollars, excluding your home and qualifying retirement savings. The credit is generally limited to the taxes attributable to the first 300,000 dollars of assessed value. Nontaxable Social Security counts as income. | Form HTC-1 or HTC-60 through the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation. One application covers both the state and county credits. |
| Calvert County Supplement | Calvert homeowners who qualify for the state credit. The county has funded a local supplement on top of the state program since 2006. | Same application. Calvert County Treasurer’s Office, 410-535-1600. |
| Homestead Tax Credit | Any owner-occupied principal residence. For an eligible home, it limits how quickly an increase in assessed value is reflected in the taxable assessment. Calvert County currently uses a 10 percent annual cap, matching the state cap. It does not cap your property’s market value or its reassessed value. | One-time application through SDAT. Many homeowners have never filed it. Check whether yours is on file. |
| Disabled veteran and surviving spouse exemptions | Veterans rated permanently and totally disabled, and certain surviving spouses. This can be a full exemption, not a partial credit. | Calvert County Treasurer’s Office or SDAT. |
Two deadlines that cost people money every year
Property tax credit filing deadlines change, and state and county pages do not always agree in a given year. Check the current deadline directly with Maryland SDAT or the Calvert County Treasurer’s Office before you apply. Do not rely on this page, or on what a neighbor remembers from last year.
Separately, if you believe your new assessment is wrong, you have 45 days from the date on the notice to appeal. Not 45 days from when you got around to opening it. Check the numbers on that notice the week it arrives.
Every figure in that table can change by legislative session. Treat it as a starting point for a phone call, not as the final word. Call the Calvert County Treasurer’s Office at 410-535-1600 or the local SDAT office at 443-550-6840. If the credits solve your problem, you will not need me, and that is a good outcome.
For many homeowners, though, the credits will not close the gap. Income limits leave out a large group of people who are asset rich and cash poor, which describes a great many Calvert County retirees sitting in homes they bought in the 1980s and 1990s. That is where the next conversation begins.
What a reverse mortgage actually is
A reverse mortgage lets a homeowner 62 or older convert part of the equity in their home into money they can use, without selling the home and without a required monthly mortgage payment.
The most common type is a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage, or HECM, which is insured by the Federal Housing Administration and governed by rules set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. For 2026, FHA set the HECM maximum claim amount at 1,249,125 dollars. The calculation uses the lesser of your appraised value, that FHA limit, and, on a purchase, the sales price. How much of it you can access depends on the age of the youngest borrower or eligible non-borrowing spouse and on the applicable interest rate.
Here is what stays true throughout:
- You keep the title. Your name stays on the deed. The lender does not own your home, in the same way your bank did not own it when you had a traditional mortgage.
- You stay in the home. The loan does not come due while you live there as your principal residence and meet your obligations.
- There is no required monthly principal and interest payment. You may make voluntary payments any time without penalty, and some borrowers do.
- You remain responsible for property taxes, homeowners insurance, and maintaining the property. This is the obligation that matters most, and I will come back to it.
- The loan becomes due when the last borrower sells, moves out permanently, or passes away.
You can take the money as a lump sum, as monthly payments, as a line of credit, or as a combination. For someone whose problem is a tax bill and an insurance premium, the line of credit and monthly payment options are usually more relevant than the lump sum, because the goal is covering a recurring cost rather than solving a one-time need.
Why the fear exists, and why it is out of date
Most of what people believe about reverse mortgages comes from the 1980s and early 1990s, before the current rules existed. Some of those old stories were earned. The industry has been rebuilt since, and today the HECM is one of the most heavily scrutinized loan programs in the country. The guardrails were put there specifically because seniors were being taken advantage of.
HUD requires independent counseling before you can apply
Before an application can move forward, you must complete a counseling session with a HUD-approved third-party agency. That counselor does not work for me. They are not paid by me. They are not paid by Fairway. Their job is to make sure you understand the program, understand the alternatives, and are not being pressured.
This is the single most important thing to understand about the fear that a senior can be talked into one of these loans. The federal government built a mandatory stop between the salesperson and the signature. Practically speaking, it also means the timeline is longer than a normal loan. Plan on it taking real days, not hours.
A financial assessment is required
Lenders must evaluate whether you can realistically keep up with property taxes, insurance, and upkeep. If the assessment shows risk, HUD requires a Life Expectancy Set Aside, which carves out a portion of your proceeds specifically to pay taxes and insurance going forward.
Borrowers sometimes hear that as a penalty. It is closer to a seatbelt. If your core problem is that the tax bill is hard to cover, having that money set aside and earmarked is the point, not an obstacle.
Cross-selling other financial products is prohibited
No one may require you to buy an annuity, an insurance product, or any other financial instrument as a condition of getting a reverse mortgage. If anyone ever suggests otherwise to you, that is your signal to end the conversation and report it.
Non-recourse: the protection almost nobody knows about
This is the feature I most wish more families understood, because it is the direct answer to the fear that a reverse mortgage will leave your children holding a bill.
A HECM is a non-recourse loan. The lender’s recovery is limited to the value of the home. Nothing else.
Work through the numbers. Suppose over many years the loan balance grows to 700,000 dollars, and when the home is finally sold it brings 600,000. There is a 100,000 dollar shortfall. Who pays it?
Not you. Not your children. Not your estate. FHA covers it through the mortgage insurance premiums that were paid into the program. Your heirs cannot be pursued for the difference, and no other asset of yours can be reached for it.
Now run it the other direction, which is the far more common outcome in a market like Calvert County. Suppose the balance is 300,000 and the home sells for 550,000. The remaining 250,000 belongs to your heirs. The lender takes what it is owed and not a dollar more.
Your heirs generally have several choices when the loan comes due. They can sell the home and keep whatever equity remains. They can keep the home by satisfying the loan under HUD’s repayment rules, typically by refinancing. Or they can walk away and owe nothing, with the property going back through the normal process.
There is one provision inside that middle option worth knowing, because almost nobody does. If the loan balance has grown beyond what the home is worth, heirs who want to keep the property can generally satisfy the HECM for 95 percent of the current appraised value rather than the full balance. In the example above, the 700,000 dollar balance on a 600,000 dollar home, heirs wanting to keep it would generally pay 570,000 rather than 700,000. Nobody is trapped, and nobody inherits a debt.
What people actually do with the money
The reason I care about this program is that it solves a specific problem I keep meeting in Southern Maryland: people with substantial wealth locked in a house and not enough cash flow to enjoy it or, in some cases, to keep it.
Making the house affordable again
A widow in Lusby with a paid-off home and a Social Security survivor benefit is watching her assessment climb and her insurance premium climb and her SMECO bill climb. She does not need a windfall. She needs a few hundred dollars a month that does not currently exist. A monthly payment option or a line of credit can cover the taxes and insurance and end the quiet math she does at the kitchen table every month.
Aging in the home rather than leaving it
The single-level addition. The walk-in shower. The ramp. The stair lift. The costs that determine whether someone gets another decade in the home they raised a family in or moves somewhere they do not want to be. That is often the real decision underneath a conversation about a tax bill.
Time with grandchildren and family
I am not going to pretend this is a financial argument. It is not. But I have sat with enough retirees to know that a person who has been careful with money their whole life often needs permission to spend some of it. If your grandchildren are in Texas and you have not seen them in two years because the airfare felt irresponsible, and you are sitting on 500,000 dollars of equity in a house that will outlive you, that is worth naming out loud. Travel. The family reunion. Being at the graduation.
Eliminating an existing mortgage payment
Not every 62-year-old owns free and clear. If you still owe 90,000 dollars and are making a payment of 1,100 a month, a reverse mortgage can pay off that balance and eliminate the required payment. You still owe taxes, insurance, and upkeep, but the largest fixed line in your budget goes away. For many households, this alone is the entire answer.
Buying a home instead of staying put
A HECM for Purchase lets a buyer 62 or older purchase a different home with a substantial down payment and no required monthly principal and interest payment. This is the tool for the homeowner in the two-story colonial who wants a single-level rancher closer to family and assumed the only options were paying all cash or taking on a new mortgage in their seventies.
A note on using equity to build wealth
Some borrowers use proceeds as part of a broader financial plan, including real estate investment. Financial researchers have also documented a strategy in which a HECM line of credit is opened early and left largely untouched, with the unused portion growing over time, creating a standby source a retiree can draw on during a market downturn instead of selling investments at a loss.
I will be straight with you about this. Those strategies belong to a different person than the one this article is written for. If you are struggling to pay your tax bill, borrowing against your home to buy investment property is not a plan, it is added risk on top of existing strain. If you are financially stable and doing genuine estate and retirement planning, that is a real conversation, and it is one I would want your financial advisor and your tax professional in the room for. Different situation, different advice.
The honest risks, stated plainly
Any article that only lists benefits is selling you something. Here is the other side.
- You must keep paying property taxes, homeowners insurance, and any HOA dues, and keep the home maintained. If you do not, the loan can be called due and payable, and foreclosure is possible. This is the number one way reverse mortgages go wrong. Read that sentence twice, because it means a reverse mortgage does not eliminate your tax obligation. It gives you money to meet it.
- The balance grows over time. Interest and insurance premiums accrue because you are not making payments. Equity available to your heirs decreases accordingly.
- The upfront costs are real. There is an initial mortgage insurance premium, an origination charge, and standard closing costs. If you expect to move within a few years, those costs likely will not be worth it.
- It can affect need-based benefits. Social Security and Medicare are not affected. Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income can be, depending on how proceeds are held. Talk to a benefits specialist before you draw funds if this applies to you.
- The home must remain your principal residence. An extended absence, including a long-term care stay generally exceeding twelve consecutive months, can trigger repayment.
Who this is probably not right for
I have told people this was the wrong fit and I will keep doing it. A reverse mortgage is likely wrong for you if you plan to move within a few years, if you cannot cover taxes and insurance even with the proceeds, if leaving the house to your children debt-free is your highest priority and you have other options, or if you have a spouse or family member pushing you toward it for reasons that serve them.
It is worth a serious look if you are 62 or older, have significant equity, intend to stay in your home, and the gap between your income and your cost of living is not going to close on its own.
Frequently asked questions
More of these are answered on my reverse mortgage myths and FAQs page.
Can the bank take my house with a reverse mortgage?
No. You hold the title, exactly as you do with a traditional mortgage. The lender has a lien, not ownership. The loan can be called due if you fail to pay property taxes and homeowners insurance, stop maintaining the property, or move out permanently, which is the same set of conditions that applies to any mortgage.
Will my children inherit my debt?
No. A HECM is a non-recourse loan. If the balance ends up higher than the home’s value, FHA insurance covers the shortfall and your heirs owe nothing beyond the property itself. If the home is worth more than the balance, the remaining equity belongs to your heirs. They can sell, refinance and keep the home, or walk away.
Do I still pay property taxes with a reverse mortgage?
Yes. You remain responsible for property taxes, homeowners insurance, HOA dues if applicable, and property maintenance. A reverse mortgage provides funds that can be used to pay those costs, and in some cases a Life Expectancy Set Aside is established to pay taxes and insurance directly, but the obligation itself remains yours.
How old do I have to be for a reverse mortgage in Maryland?
The youngest borrower must be at least 62 years old for a HECM, the FHA-insured reverse mortgage this article describes. Age is also one of the inputs that determines how much you can access: the older the youngest borrower, the larger the percentage of value available.
How much money can I get from a reverse mortgage?
It depends on the age of the youngest borrower or eligible non-borrowing spouse, the applicable interest rate, and the lesser of your home’s appraised value and the 2026 FHA maximum claim amount of 1,249,125 dollars. Older borrowers qualify for a larger percentage. Any existing mortgage must be paid off first from the proceeds. The only way to know your number is to have it calculated for your specific situation.
Is a reverse mortgage a scam?
The HECM is a federally insured loan program administered by HUD and the FHA, with mandatory independent third-party counseling, a required financial assessment, and a prohibition on cross-selling other financial products. It is one of the most closely regulated mortgage products available. Scams do exist in the surrounding space, generally involving unsolicited contractors or people offering to handle paperwork for a fee, which is why you should work with a licensed loan officer you can verify on NMLS Consumer Access.
What property tax relief is available to seniors in Calvert County, Maryland?
Calvert County homeowners may qualify for the Maryland Homeowners’ Property Tax Credit, which currently requires combined gross household income of 60,000 dollars or less and net worth under 200,000 dollars excluding the home and qualifying retirement savings. Calvert County funds a local supplement to that credit, and one application covers both. Separately, the Homestead Tax Credit limits how quickly assessment increases reach the taxable assessment on a principal residence, using a 10 percent annual cap in Calvert County. Certain disabled veterans and surviving spouses may qualify for exemptions. Contact the Calvert County Treasurer’s Office at 410-535-1600 or Maryland SDAT to confirm current eligibility and deadlines.
How long does a reverse mortgage take to close?
Longer than a conventional loan, primarily because HUD requires you to complete independent counseling before the application can proceed. Plan for a longer timeline and start earlier than you think you need to, particularly if a tax deadline is driving the decision.
Have the conversation before the bill arrives
I am a Reverse Mortgage Planner with Fairway, based in La Plata, and I work with homeowners throughout Calvert, Charles, St. Mary’s, and Prince George’s counties. If you want someone to run your actual numbers and tell you honestly whether this makes sense, that conversation costs nothing and carries no obligation.
Bring your adult children if you want them there. I would rather answer their questions in the room than have them worry about it later.
Book a call with Ken Call or text (240) 237-7855 Request a scenario review
Sources
- Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation, 2025 and 2026 reassessment group data. Maryland reassesses one of three property groups each year; the two percentages cited apply to different groups of properties.
- Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, residential Standard Offer Service base energy rates effective August 1, 2026
- Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation, Homeowners’ Property Tax Credit and Homestead Tax Credit program requirements
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mortgagee Letter 2025-22, 2026 HECM maximum claim amount
- Calvert County Treasurer’s Office, Available County Property Tax Credits
Ken Powell | Mortgage Loan Officer | NMLS #2656628 | Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation d/b/a Fairway Home Mortgage | NMLS #2289 | NMLS Consumer Access | Equal Housing Lender.
Reverse mortgage borrowers are required to obtain an eligibility certificate by receiving counseling sessions with a HUD-approved agency. The youngest borrower must be at least 62 years old. Monthly reverse mortgage advances may affect eligibility for some other programs. This material has not been reviewed, approved, or issued by HUD, FHA, or any government agency. The company is not affiliated with or acting on behalf of or at the direction of HUD, FHA, or any other government agency.
Borrowers remain responsible for payment of property taxes, homeowners insurance, and property maintenance. Failure to meet these obligations may result in the loan becoming due and payable. This article is provided for educational purposes and is not tax, legal, or financial advice. Property tax credit programs, eligibility thresholds, and filing deadlines change. Verify all program details directly with the Calvert County Treasurer’s Office and the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation before relying on them. Consult your own tax professional, attorney, or financial advisor regarding your specific circumstances.
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About the Author
Ken Powell · Mortgage Loan Officer, Fairway Home Mortgage · NMLS #2656628 · Hughesville, MD
Ken is a retired U.S. Navy veteran, a former Realtor with more than 10 years and $22M+ in closed sales, and a real estate investor since 2014. He specializes in VA, DSCR, and self-employed financing across Maryland and Virginia. Learn more →
Equal Housing Lender