How to make your Dutch home work for you when you retire

De Boer Financial Consultants are specialised in expat mortgages. Article author José de Boer is the owner and director and has many years of experience dealing with a wide variety of expat-related legal and financial matters.

Expat homeowners who have chosen to settle permanently in the Netherlands, or have decided to retire here, are likely to have a considerable amount of capital tied up in their property. House prices have soared in the Netherlands in recent years, and are now above their pre-financial crisis level. This means your home is likely to be worth considerably more than you paid for it, or than your current mortgage.

Make the most of your home's added value

So, if you are thinking about retiring and living the good life, what can you do to make the most of your home's added value? It used to be the case in the Netherlands that you had no option other than to sell your home if you wanted to access the capital tied up in the property. But Dutch banks are starting to realise that this is not an option for everyone.

One thing you can do to boost your retirement income is to take out a special sort of mortgage, which allows you to live in your home and enjoy a sum of money to top up your income. In Dutch, these new forms of financing are known as excess value, cash-in or even ‘eat-up’ mortgages – all names which go some way to explaining how they work. Of course, you can do more than just travel the world in an open-topped sports car with the money these mortgages release.

Spend it on the kids

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You could, for example, support your offspring by helping them buy a house or pay off their student loans, or carry out improvements to your own property to enable you to live independently for longer. You might just want to have extra cash around if your retirement income is not as much as you had hoped.

It is worth noting that if you have not lived in the Netherlands for 50 years by the time you retire, you will not be eligible for a full state pension – which is currently some €1.400 a month for a couple. In the Netherlands, you build up 2% of state pension (AOW) for every year you live here. So if you have been registered for, say, 30 years, by the time you reach the current official retirement age of 66 years and four months, you will only get 60% of the state pension.

By the way, in case you were wondering, no other country in Europe has such a long residency requirement.

Things to think about

If you have a valuable property and want to continue living in it, it might be worth looking into releasing some of the capital. So what do you need to take into account?

Firstly, your property needs to have been well maintained and it needs to have excess value. Secondly, you need to decide how much money you want it to bring in – and whether this should be in the form of a lump sum or via a monthly payment.

And of course, you will have to continue paying off your original mortgage, if you still have one. The debt of the new ‘eat-up’ mortgage will, in effect, be added to the first one and only has to be paid back once you, or your partner, die or sell up. All you pay extra is the interest.

Decisions, decisions

There are, of course, some downsides to all this. Firstly, if you later decide to downsize, you will have used some of the excess value in your home already, so you might have less to spend on a new property. And, of course, your children will inherit less when you die, because you’ve been making the most of your money while you are alive. 

However, if you can see yourself cruising around Tuscany in a sports car or visiting palm-fringed tropical islands on a trip around the world, or even making your kids happy, it might just be worth thinking about.

For more information on mortgages and an analysis of your possibilities, talk to FVB de Boer. You can call them on +31 70 5118788 or get in touch by completing the contact form.