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Home Equity

Home Equity

There are plenty of benefits to owning a home. One of the most important? You can build equity and borrow against it in the form of home equity loans.

You can use the money from these loans however you want. You could pay for a major kitchen remodel, pay off your high-interest-rate credit card debt or help cover the cost of your children’s college tuition.

But what exactly are home equity loans? How do you qualify for them, and how do they work?

Here’s a look at these important tools

What Is Equity?

To qualify for a home equity loan, you’ll need to have built up enough equity in your home. Equity is the difference between what your home is worth today and what you owe on your mortgage. If you owe $150,000 on your mortgage and your home is worth $200,000, you have $50,000 worth of equity.

You build equity by making your monthly mortgage payments. But you’ll also build equity if your home goes up in value. If you owed $120,000 on your mortgage when your home was worth $150,000, you’d have $30,000 in equity.

But if property values in your community were on the rise and this same home was worth $180,000, you’d have $60,000 of equity, without having made any extra payments.

When you apply for a home equity loan, your lender will usually approve you for a loan equal to a portion of your equity, not the entire amount. If you have $80,000 of equity, for instance, a lender might approve you for a maximum home equity loan of $70,000.

What Are Home Equity Loans?

Home equity loans are second mortgage loans that you pay off with monthly payments, just as you do with your primary mortgage.

Once you’re approved for a home equity loan, you’ll receive your money in a single lump payment. You then pay the loan back with interest over a set period of years.

The number of years this will take depends on the loan term you agreed to when taking out your home equity loan. Your monthly payment will depend on the amount you borrowed and your interest rate.

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When a Home Equity Loan Makes Sense

One of the greatest benefits of a home equity loan is that you can use the money from them for whatever you want.

If you need to update a kitchen that was last renovated in the 1970s, you can use the cash from a home equity loan to pay your contractor. If you want to help your children cover their college tuition, you can use a home equity loan for this, too.

If you have a specific project in mind, then, taking out a home equity loan might be one of the most affordable ways to fund it.

Maybe you're burdened with thousands of dollars of high-interest-rate credit card debt. Because your home acts as collateral with a home equity loan, lenders take on less risk than they do when passing out personal loans.

Because of this, home equity loans come with lower interest rates. It might make financial sense to swap home equity debt, with its lower interest rates, with your more expensive credit card debt.

Can You Still Deduct the Interest You Pay on Home Equity Loans?

Before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 became law, homeowners could deduct on their taxes the interest they paid on home equity loans no matter how they used the money. That has changed.

According to the IRS, you can now only deduct the interest on home equity loans if you use the money to substantially improve the home that secures the loan.

This means that you can’t deduct the interest if you use a home equity loan to pay off credit card debt or cover a child’s college tuition.

If you use your home equity loan to build a new master bedroom suite on your home, you can deduct the interest you pay on that loan. That’s because you are using the proceeds from the loan to improve the home.

 

Home Equity Loan Alternatives

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