Ask:
If yes, what did you use it for?
Answer:
No, we would never even consider and home equity loan. My DH works in the oil/gas industry and its either feast or famine (he either makes more money than we need or not enough). My DH's salary never changes even during the slow times so we try to keep our expenses down to what we can pay for with his salary since the bonus is not garuanteed we don't count on that.
Answer:
We had one on our first house. It wiped out all our credit card debt, but we racked it up again then had more bills to pay then we started with. Plus we had to sell the house for an amount to cover the loan. Learned my lesson the hard way and will never get one again. Instead I have rolled our old credit card debt to lower interest ones.
Answer:
We don't now since the move, but on the old house we did. We used it to consolidate our debt (which was our Truck payment and a few CC's) when I became a SAHM. I don't think that it is something that we would use again unless we could pay it off immediately, or use it toward something that would make us a profit in the long run (ie: livestock).
Answer:
No, we did about 10 yrs ago, but not any more. I would much rather have a home equity line of credit than a 2nd mortgage.
Answer:
We don't have one anymore, but took one out when we purchased this house. We had to sink all our money into the down payment (we put 20% down to avoid PMI) and still needed to buy appliances, a water softner, and do some other fix-ups. I hated the idea of having one and am glad it's paid off now.
Answer:
We don't have one, but we considered it when we were figuring out how to get out from under dh's financial mess. I'm glad we didn't do it.
Answer:
Yup we have one. Its about 3 years old. WE used it to pay off some ccs when we were DROWNING in debt I didn't know another way out, other than selling. It was a great thing at the time, and it did help. I dont' regret it. What I DO regret is not being smart about this earlier, and keeping the debt away befroe we got in this mess again. But I'm not taking our another loan, I will do what I can to pull ourselves out of this.
Answer:
we had one to pay off credit cards the intrest was way lower than cc and we payed everything off in a year. it really saved us.
Answer:
I voted yes....Last summer we got into the attic to install ceiling fans and found it was full of black mold. Our family had been sick off and on for over a year and I had bad headaches every day. We felt so stupid for not thinking that it could be something in our house! We had the shole top of our house ripped of and replaced. Since it was a big shock, we didn't have time to save. It still makes me a little ill when I think about the line of credit on the house. But we haven't been sick OR had any headaches since we did it!