Schadenfreude Fans Troll Tom Selleck After He Claims He Could Lose His Ranch
Tom Selleck claimed that he could find himself homeless now that Blue Bloods is coming to an end — where are the other two men and the baby going to live now?
Though it wouldn’t be completely unheard-of for a TV star with a list of credits as immense as Selleck’s to burn through their riches and find themselves mansion-less, when Selleck went on CBS Sunday Morning this past weekend and cried that the recent cancelation of his CBS police procedural after a whopping 14 seasons might lead to him losing his sprawling 63-acre California ranch, it was hard not to let out a little giggle.
After all, the 79-year-old Emmy-winner has been on TV basically every week for the last 50 years, so you’d assume that, in that time, Selleck would have learned how to manage his money well enough so that every show he books doesn’t need to last 20 seasons for him to stay afloat. For a man with self-professed “libertarian leanings,” Selleck saying, "You know, hopefully I keep working enough to hold onto the place" after making $200,000 per episode of Blue Bloods for the last 14 years doesn’t exactly strike us as fiscally conservative.
“Seriously, that’s an issue? If you stopped working?” an incredulous Tracy Smith asked the Magnum, P.I. star.
“That’s always an issue,” Selleck claimed. “If I stopped working, yeah. Am I set for life? Yeah, but maybe not on a 63-acre ranch!”
When news of Selleck’s impending insolvency hit the internet, Twitter users who remembered a particularly despicable paycheck Selleck once cashed rushed to ask him, “Have you considered a reverse mortgage?”
As the internet was so eager to remind the mustachioed TV legend, in 2016, he signed on to be the spokesperson for reverse mortgage lender American Advisors Group in national TV commercials that irresponsibly downplayed the risks and drawbacks of the loan. As opposed to a normal mortgage, a reverse mortgage is a loan taken out by homeowners (often elderly ones) to borrow against the value of their home and secure cash for their living expenses without having to make regular loan payments, as the lender only collects on the debt when the home is eventually sold or when the borrower passes away.
Of course, when companies like AAG hand out such loans, they don’t advertise the substantial additional costs and fees associated with the loan, or the variable interests rates that can rise over time and balloon the debt owed, or the fact that failure to uphold the stringent terms of the reverse mortgage can and will result in immediate foreclosure, or how the lender will inevitably drain the borrower’s equity in the house like the financial vampires they are and leave the homeowners and their loved ones with nothing.
And, seeing as reverse mortgages are usually taken out by elderly homeowners who don’t have the income to support their regular living expenses and can’t comprehend the complex legal documents, the reverse mortgage market is absolutely overflowing with scammers and opportunists who will steal old people’s homes out from under them with excessively complicated contracts and predatory terms.
So, when Selleck complained that he could lose a luxurious estate that has been valued at $11 million because CBS doesn’t want to keep paying him a literal fortune every week to do the Officer Grandpa show, all the internet’s empathy was used up on the old folks and their kids who lost their homes because AAG paid Selleck to promise them that a reverse mortgage was risk-free and would solve all of their problems.
On top of that, after news broke that Selleck was supposedly facing homelessness, the Blue Bloods blowhard quickly backtracked and a source close to him contacted TMZ to clarify that Selleck’s claim on CBS Sunday Morning was hyperbolic, and that he only meant to say that he was eager to move on to his next job as quickly as possible.
However, Selleck himself hasn’t made any further statement regarding the future of his mega-ranch — it wouldn’t be like him to lie about real estate issues, would it?
