A $1.1 trillion spending bill passed by the Senate over the weekend will make way for housing counseling funding, including reverse mortgage counseling, which relies heavily on government appropriations each year.
The spending bill, which passed narrowly through the House on Thursday and under a special session of the Senate this weekend, includes $47 million in appropriations for housing counseling, which spans reverse mortgage funding, but does not specify an amount designated for reverse mortgage counseling.
In January 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development changed the way it allocates counseling funding for reverse mortgage counseling agencies. Rather than allocate funds separately from the overall pool of housing counseling funding as was done previously, HUD announced through a Notice of Funding Availability that it would lump all funding together as it shown in the current funding bill.
The $47 million in funding is a slight uptick from fiscal year 2014 when the agency received $45 million for housing counseling.
In 2013, the funding totaled $40 million.
In recent years, reverse mortgage counseling funding has been less certain. In 2011, funds for counseling were cut off altogether as the result of funding being slashed from the government’s spending bill. Funding was later restored, though many agencies experienced long wait times and were forced to raise the cost of reverse mortgage counseling in the interim.
Written by Elizabeth Ecker
