You only pay when you use it. When you get a HELOC, you’re not taking a lump sum of cash out of your home. You’re setting it up as a maximum drawable balance, and if you always left the balance at zero, your payment would be zero. This makes a HELOC a flexible tool to have cash available only when needed. When you do use it, you’ll start getting a monthly statement and the payment will be calculated on the outstanding balance.

Interest-only payment. Some HELOCs allow you to make an interest-only payment. On a HELOC with a $35,000 balance, an interest-only payment is about $85 per month lower than a 20-year fully-amortized payment (a common amortization period for HELOCs that require a fully amortized payment). This is useful if you want to conserve monthly cash, but your lender will qualify you using a fully amortized payment on the HELOC’s maximum balance or an even more stringent qualifying formula. This worst-case qualifying methodology is to protect you from obtaining a loan you cannot afford. If your HELOC has an interest-only payment option and you pay this option, you won’t be paying your balance down. Make sure you find a HELOC lender that will walk you through both options before securing a HELOC.

Investing in a new home. A HELOC is a great tool to access equity in your existing home to buy or put a down payment on a new home, such as a second home or investment property. Home buying can take months, so if you did a traditional cash-out loan to obtain funds for a new purchase, you could be paying for use of those funds long before you ever invested them. Because you only pay on the HELOC when you use it, you can leave the HELOC at a zero balance while you shop for homes, and only use the HELOC funds (and therefore start paying interest and a monthly payment) when you find a home to buy.

Home improvements. Likewise, if you were remodeling slowly over time, you wouldn’t want to pay for use of all of those funds from day one. For example, maybe you were going to redo your kitchen for $25,000, then wait a year before redoing your bathrooms for another $25,000. With a traditional home loan — like a cash-out refinance of your first mortgage — you’d start paying the interest and payments on $50,000 as of day one. With a HELOC, you would use $25,000 for the kitchen, and wouldn’t add another $25,000 to the balance and payment until a year later. This would save you about $100 per month in interest for that year.

Large purchase like a car or appliances. If you plan to finance a large purchase like this, you should compare financing costs with HELOC costs. Often a HELOC will prove to be a competitive option for a purchase like this.

“Fixed-rate advance” aka “fixed-rate draw” option. HELOCs are adjustable-rate loans (more on this below,) but they also have a feature that allows you to fix a portion of the drawn amount. So if you were going to remodel, or buy a car or appliance, you could do so by fixing that portion of your HELOC draw. In our $25,000 kitchen remodel above, you could use a fixed-rate advance option to make that portion of your HELOC fixed. This is a good option if you know you’re not going to repay that sum for a longer period of time.

Resource: www.Zillow.com