Q: My husband and I hope to retire in 2011 when we will be 62, and we would like to get a reverse mortgage to help pay for our retirement. What do you think?

A: Reverse mortgages are a mixed bag – a great fallback for funding retirement, but charging rather high fees. Also, you could get a good deal more money out of a reverse mortgage if you waited until you were 10 or 20 years older.

Reversers are loans that use the property as collateral, just like regular mortgages and home-equity loans. Since the money is a loan rather than income or capital gains, it is tax-free.

With a reverser, however, you won’t make monthly loan payments, and there’s no deadline for paying the money back. Instead, the principal and accumulated interest charges are paid off when the property is sold, even if that is not until after the owners have died.

The lender cannot require that the loan be repaid earlier. Nor can the lender go after the borrowers’ other assets to repay the debt, even if the property ends up being worth less than the borrowers owe.

To offset this risk, lenders limit the amount they lend to only a portion of the property’s assessed value. The younger the borrower, the smaller the loan.

Using the online calculator at www.reversemortgage.org, I looked at how much I could borrow on my home. With a home equity conversion mortgage, which accounts for about 90 percent of reversers, I found I could get $117,010 if I were 62. But I could get $146,907 if I were 72, and $180,447 if I were 82.

Interest rates and closing costs on reverse mortgages tend to be a tad higher than those for regular mortgages, and there are some special insurance charges. Because of all the drawbacks, reversers are best used only if your other retirement-funding sources run short.

AARP, the organization for older Americans, has an excellent guide to reversers at www.aarp.org/money/revmort.