Montreal Seniors Beware: Why Leveraging Your Paid‑Off Home or Equity Can Destroy Your Retirement | Bridge Hennessey

Montreal is living through a very polished version of a very old story: retirees being pushed to play a young person’s game with old person’s risk.

Across the city, real estate brokers, notaries and “personal finance advisors” are teaming up to host elegant symposiums and slick online webinars for homeowners in their sixties and seventies. The message sounds sophisticated and responsible. Your home is underused. Unlock your equity. You have a million dollar asset, why let it just sit there. Borrow against it, expand your portfolio, invest with us in real estate or the markets, keep your money “working.” When you only look at the last ten years, it sounds like common sense.

But that last decade is just one chapter. Real estate does not only go up. Stocks do not only go up. Silver and gold do not only go up. We have just seen what happens when people forget that.

Take the 62-year old man who bought his last property in the frenzy of 2022.

He was told, like everyone else, that the market had never been so hot, that real estate was the safest investment, that he “had to” act now before being priced out forever. The house was listed at $760,000. In a bidding war, he ended up paying over $900,000. Even today, in 2026, if he sold that property, he would not recover his money. The values simply have not come back to the level he paid. Ask him why he pushed himself into that bidding madness, like a casino player chasing one last win, and he will tell you: the real estate broker was right there with him, hyped, encouraging, cheering him on.

I looked at him and asked the only question that matters: who really benefited from you paying that price. The higher the purchase price, the higher the broker’s commission. Did the agent have his client’s best interest at heart when he let a retiree blow past his budget for a house that was not worth the number, or did he have his own paycheck in mind. The outcome speaks for itself. The homeowner is stuck with an overpaid asset and regret. The broker has long since cashed his cheque and moved on.

Or consider the man who bought metals at the recent peak, lats week was a record. Everyone around him was saying the same lines you hear in every cycle. There is uncertainty. There is political risk. There is economic fear. Silver and gold are a safe haven. They do not go down. It is the wise, defensive move. He put $100,000 into silver and gold at the highest prices reached so far. Within 24-hours, he opened his phone and saw that his position had dropped by about 20%. His $100,000 was now roughly $68,000. He panicked, as any human being would. Now he has no choice but to sit and wait, hoping that one day prices will climb back to where he bought in.

I sincerely hope, for his sake, that they do. But it may take years. It may never fully recover in the time he has left. And where is the advisor who told him to buy, buy, buy because it was a great deal and a safe haven. Where is the person who said it “cannot go down” and that this was smart in a bad economy. They were paid the moment he placed the order. Their income is secure. His is not.

If this sounds familiar, it is because we have seen it before. Watch “The Wolf of Wall Street” and you will understand the mentality. For too many players in this space, there is no such thing as “enough” when it comes to commissions. As long as there is someone who inherited or a retiree with equity and fear to tap into, there is one more product to sell.

Now place yourself back in the shoes of that 70-year old who refinances a paid off home, invests $300,000 to $500,000 into new real estate or the markets because “everyone” says it is wise, and then hits a downturn. Maybe real estate drops 15 to 30%. Maybe interest rates climb back toward the high single digits or even 10 to 12% like we saw in past decades. Maybe rents stop coming in smoothly. It is not just the financial damage that hurts. It is the feeling of having to sit your children down and say, “We thought we were doing something smart. We took the equity from the house. We played the stock market and the real estate game. It did not work. What we wanted to leave you as an inheritance is gone.”

Most retirees are not chasing yachts. They simply want to protect what they have, sleep at night, and, if possible, pass something on. When a strategy puts that at serious risk in exchange for a maybe, that is not planning. That is gambling dressed in a suit.

The hard truth is that, in many of these arrangements, the 70-year old homeowner is not the first priority. The priority is getting their equity into motion, because that is where everyone else’s income lies. The broker earns on the deal. The notary earns on the paperwork. The advisor earns on the assets placed under management. They are not all bad people. But the system pulls them toward one outcome: convince you to move as much of your safety net as possible into investments that generate ongoing fees.

This is exactly why people hire us. At YUL514 and Montreal Investing, my work as Bridge Hennessey is not to see how far I can stretch your risk tolerance. It is to protect your peace of mind first and your money second, not the other way around. You bring me in so that at least one person in the conversation is paid to say “slow down.” Someone who will read what you are being asked to sign, who will run the numbers based on full cycles, not just the last boom, and who will tell you plainly when something is not appropriate for your age, your health or your goals.

I am not asking you to distrust everyone and blindly trust me. I am asking you to be very clear about incentives. Many of the people telling you “you are wasting your equity” are only paid when you use it. I am paid the same whether I tell you to go ahead or to walk away. My fees are flat. I do not get a bonus for talking you into more leverage, more products or more doors. There is a simple line that captures that difference: they want your money, not your peace of mind. I want your peace of mind, not your money.

If you are in your 50's, 60's or 70's and you are being invited to events, contacted on social media or gently pushed to “put your equity to work,” pause. It is not automatically wrong to invest. It is not automatically wrong to use some of your equity in a wise, limited, well structured way. But the cost of being wrong at this stage of life is brutally high. For some people, there will simply not be enough time in their remaining years for a full rebound from a big mistake.

Let that not be you. Keep your finances safe. Keep your money safe. Before you commit your home, your savings or your inheritance to a strategy that could backfire in a downturn, get a real second opinion.

That is what I am here for. Book a free fifteen minute call with me, Bridge Hennessey at Montreal Investing. Bring the proposal and the story you are being told. We will go through it together, quietly and clearly. If it is solid, I will say so.

If it is dangerous, I will say that too. Your retirement should not depend on the hope that the next ten years look like the last ten. It should be built on decisions that you can live with, and sleep with, no matter where we are in the cycle.

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