Strategies for Navigating Market Swings and Leveraging Home Equity Wisely
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Elizabeth, have you peaked yet? Have I peaked? No, my best days are ahead of me. But have you peaked at your 401k balances? Sean, also no, because their best days are ahead of them too. Okay, you know, that's a good way to think about it. But today we're going to hear some coping strategies for when stock market madness starts to keep you up at night. ♪

Welcome to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast, where you send us your money questions and we answer them with the help of our genius nerds. I'm Sean Piles. And I'm Elizabeth Ayola. This episode, we're answering a listener's question about the pros and cons of home equity loans. But

But first, our weekly money news roundup, where we break down the latest in the world of finance to help you be smarter with your money. One of the ways to be smarter with your money is to ignore it, or at least parts of it. The recent wild fluctuations in the stock market is one example. Yeah, it's been a wild ride, and that ride is most likely not over yet. We've been here before. We'll be here again.

And yes, some of the most basic advice is to not look at your 401k balances or 529s for that matter. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be paying attention. Our news colleague, Ana Helhosky, is here with more. Ana, you're going to help us out here, right?

Bring us some sage advice on how to keep on keeping on in our retirement and college savings account. Well, I'll give it a shot. And I'm joined by fellow nerd Sam Taub, who covers investing for us. Welcome back, Sam. Great to be here. Let's start with the obvious question. Can you look into your crystal ball and tell us when the market madness is going to stop?

Of course, and then we'll both be millionaires. Ah, perfect. Yep. With regard to tariffs, the uncertainty is a big part of why markets are whipsawing up and down so dramatically over the last month. No one really knows how far tariffs will go or when we've arrived at the final tariff program.

Things keep changing. For example, the Mexico and Canada tariffs were announced and then they were delayed and then they were implemented and then they were partially scaled back. All right, fine. Since we can't look into the future, let's do a little bit of an explainer instead. Can you talk to us about why stock markets worldwide freaked out in the wake of the tariff announcements? Tariffs are taxes on imports, and we import quite a lot of stuff.

They may raise production costs for businesses, which would be bad for the stock market because it would hurt corporate earnings. But tariffs may also be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

In other words, they could juice inflation. That would be unfortunate in its own right, and it could also complicate the Federal Reserve's plans to lower interest rates, which is something the stock market has kind of been counting on for a while now. Sam, can you give us some perspective on just how manic this market is right now?

Is it 2008 financial crisis wild or 2020 pandemic wild? This might not age well, depending on when people are listening to this episode, but this tariff volatility so far isn't nearly as bad as either of those things, at least not yet.

2008 and 2020 both saw severe bear markets in all the major stock indexes. And for reference, a bear market is when an index falls 20% or more from a recent high. For now, the Nasdaq is in bear market territory, but the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average haven't gotten there yet. What's an average investor to do in a time like this? I

I've seen all kinds of advice out there and some of it the tried and true. If you're not retiring the next five years, just don't look at your account balances and let history take its course. But some of it is also sounding alarms about how the Trump administration is trying to remake the global economy and that we're in uncharted territory where the old rules and historic record might not apply. Help us out here.

This tariff news has brought up fears of a stock market downturn or maybe even a recession or higher inflation. And yeah, it's enough to make anyone feel a little helpless. But zooming out from investments for a second, one way to gain a sense of control is just to take some basic steps to make your personal finances more resilient. That might mean transitioning.

trying to build up an emergency fund with three to six months of living expenses, which can act as a cushion against job loss.

Or it might mean paying down high-interest debts. For example, credit card debts, whose APRs are often quite a bit higher than any kind of realistic rate of investment return. That's another good way to get ready for anything. And are there any sectors of the investing world that haven't taken a hit, or at least as big of a one as, say, the Dow or the S&P have? And if so, does that mean we should all pile on that bandwagon?

Paradoxically, international stocks have actually held up pretty well because many publicly traded companies in other countries do most of their business in that country and aren't super exposed to trade with the U.S. As a result of that, there are a lot of ex-U.S. ETFs out there, funds that exclude U.S. stocks and just contain international stocks.

that are actually up for the year while the S&P 500 is down. Also, although there have been some recent headlines about treasury bond prices being volatile, many bond ETFs have also held up better than U.S. stocks. One advisor I spoke to recommended that retirees in particular should look into bond ladders. These are...

Sets of bonds with staggered maturities that you invest in and they provide monthly or annual cash flow, which can then be reinvested or withdrawn and spent. Bond ladders can cushion retirees from needing to sell stocks at a loss if they need money.

But to answer your second question, no, just because certain investments are holding up better than others doesn't mean that we should all pile into those investments. The U.S. stock market looks pretty scary right now, but it's worth holding on to some U.S. stocks for diversification purposes. This might be optimistic, but there's still some chance we could back down from all this tariff business, in which case the current volatility could retrospectively look like a great opportunity to buy the dip.

All right. That was really helpful. Thanks so much, Sam. Thanks for having me on. And thank you, Ana. Yeah. Thanks, Sean. Up next, we have a listener's question about home equity lines of credit. But before we get into that, a reminder, listener, to send us your money questions. Leave us a voicemail or text us on the Nerd Hotline at 901-730-6373. That's 901-730-NERD.

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One more time, that's vote.webiawards.com. We're back and answering your money questions to help you make smarter financial decisions. Now, this episode, we're joined by Irene, a listener with some questions about the pros and cons of home equity borrowing and the best way to fund home improvements. Welcome to Smart Money, Irene. Hi, I'm so happy to be here. We're excited. It's going to be a great chat.

And I'm also joined by NerdWallet Mortgages writer, Kate Wood, to help me answer Irene's questions. Welcome back to Smart Money, Kate. Thank you so much for having me back. Let's get the conversation started. So we're going to start with a little icebreaker for you, Irene. Now, if you had to describe your current financial situation in one word, what would it be and why? I'm going to say growing just because...

Not necessarily that our, I mean, our money hopefully is growing, but I have been growing a lot in just the education of our finances. A lot of that is thanks to y'all's podcast. It's been

incredibly helpful and just teaching me really some financial basics that I've never learned before. And so my husband and I have just kind of been on this financial journey trying to grow in our knowledge of what our money is doing and how to make it work for us. I listened to the episode on like, what is a recession, you know, and things like that, you know, just overall money concepts too.

Oh, I love that. And because finances are a journey, I think you're always growing. So it sounds like you're in a good spot. Yeah. Let's dig into your financial situation. So tell us some basics about your financial life generally. What's going well? Where do you think you have more room to grow? What's going well is we've done some things that I feel like are really positive steps forwards in our finances. Like we just recently opened a 529.

accounts for our boys. We have two young boys. And so that's something we've been meaning to do and just hadn't for years. So we just opened those accounts for them. And we did like a grocery challenge in February. So yeah, I think that's going well for us to kind of

do more research, make some really positive moves that'll help us in the future. And then also in the current situation with our budget, just trying to be more mindful of our spending and in places we can grow, I would say just

Saving in general, if we're sticking to our budget and then what we get post taxes and our bank account each month from our work, we should have about a $3,000 buffer. However, saving even $1,000 of that feels really challenging month to month because inevitably things come up.

For example, this past month, one of our family members was in the hospital and we're getting those hospital bills and it's like $1,500. So it feels really hard to save. I can relate with that challenge, especially in this economy. So speaking of savings, what are your savings like? How much do you all have saved currently? So right now we have a total of $40,000 in our savings and that's with $25,000 in a high yield savings account. Thanks to you guys. We didn't even know about

those until we started listening to your podcast. And that gets 4% interest and then 15,000 interest.

is in our just bank savings account. - And then I'm curious to know in terms of your savings, does that cover three to six months worth of expenses? - About three if we're spending like we normally do. Our monthly budget is about $13,000. And so, yeah, if we weren't cutting back on anything, we should have for three months, $39,000. And just for context, my husband works full-time and then I work part-time. I work just two days a week.

Now let's move on to your debt. Do you have any debt at the moment? We do. We have our mortgage. So we own a home and we have a mortgage on that. And then my husband, we have student loans from him going to law school. So we owe about $37,000 on student loans. But other than that, that's it. So just the mortgage and the student loans, we don't have credit card debt or a car payment. Okay.

And just for interest, what do you and your husband do? What are your occupations? So my husband is an attorney for a tech company. And then I am a speech pathologist in the public schools. Okay, great. So now we're actually going to go into the conversation about what you wrote us about, which is home ownership. So talk to us a little bit about your home ownership journey. So we bought a house.

I guess, two summers ago. It was a total fixer-upper. We bought it off the market. It was in need of a lot of help. So we put about $100,000 into just making it really a livable space. So that wasn't even adding on to the house. That was

gutting it and redoing most of the interior of the house. But it is a small house in a very expensive part of California. And so, you know, the cost of living is high. We paid a lot for the house. I think it was a really good investment. We are in a great location, have a great view, but it's a one bathroom and three bedroom. So it's tiny and we are a family of four. And so we definitely see in our future adding on to the house minimally

a extra bedroom and bathroom, but possibly more than that. We have family who live out of state. So, you know, big goal for us would be eventually one day adding maybe even a back unit so that they have some place to stay or like maybe adding two bedrooms and two bathrooms. All of that's negotiable. But just for our family on day-to-day living, we live in a pretty small space. So yeah, that's kind of our ultimate goal is to add on.

Well, an ADU is an amazing goal to have. That's definitely a fun extra and that's really helpful context. So since I am a mortgages nerd, is it okay if I ask you a couple of questions about the mortgage? Yes, please. Yes, I'll do my best to answer them. Okay. One is, do you know what kind of home loan you have? Yeah.

I do not. Do you want me to go ask my husband really quick? Oh my goodness. No, no, no. You do not need to do that. If you don't know, it is most likely that you have a conventional loan. That's just basically a normal mortgage. Yeah, we definitely didn't do one of the special ones or if you're a first-time home buyer, we didn't do one of those. Okay. So basically conventional loan. And since you bought the home...

just two years ago. Do you remember how much of a down payment you made in terms of a percentage of the purchase price? I want to say the house, we bought it for like...

around $800,000 and we put down, I want to say $100,000, but I really can't remember because of the fact that we held some back for renovations. Actually, he did tell me, he told me that what's left on the mortgage, he thinks is like about $726,000, something like that. So we definitely didn't put $100,000 in. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. So in terms of equity, our best guess based on what you said is that

You have not a ton of equity, but given that you've described that you are in California, you've got this amazing location, this and that. Clearly, if you bought a home in the past couple of years, you're very aware that the real estate market there is...

They're very much alive, very vibrant, very much a seller's market. Prices, home values have been going up. So it is possible that if you got the home appraised now, that it's going to appraise for higher than what you bought it for, also because you did the renovations on it, right? Bringing it up to date and simply if home values have appreciated in your area. So you might have more equity than you initially might seem to have. And that kind of leads into...

The obvious question of, okay, so we have all these amazing home renovation goals. How are you thinking about funding them? Yeah. And that's really my question for you guys, because kind of going back to my goal of saving, I kind of,

made a low ball goal of saving $1,000 a month. I was like, this is a good starting point. A couple months ago, I feel like that's attainable. But if we're going with that, we'll have enough money to do a renovation in 10 years. And so as far as funding it, I'm curious if there's any creative ways we can leverage

The house as an asset, ideally funding it with cash would be great. That just seems like such a lofty goal right now. One of the ideas we have and that our contractor, when she was redoing the interior of the house mentioned is we could take the garage space and either just simply renovate that or build on top of it.

ballpark, she said, you know, maybe $100,000 to $150,000. And if there is one thing I have learned with home renovations, it's so often more than that. You know what I mean? Like you get, yeah, the quote you think it's, or what you think it's going to cost is so often, yeah, double that. So what I'm thinking is like we would need about $150,000 to do it. And that feels like a really lofty goal as far as savings goes.

I understand that. So Irene, I want to ask you, what are your thoughts in terms of how to fund it? So there are three primary ways. Of course, there are more, but three primary that you could fund your home renovations. And one is through a home equity loan. You could also do a home equity line of credit or a cash out refinance.

So what are your thoughts in terms of how you wanna fund this home renovation or what have you been exploring? - We've kind of been exploring all three of those. Something that I would love for you guys to help me with is just understanding the pros and cons of those options.

Because I think my fear is we enter into something like a home equity loan and it's what we need in our current stage of life. But in 10 years, we regret that we did that because it results in us kind of making an unwise financial decision.

Kate, do you want to talk through the different ways of financing a home renovation? Sure. So just to be clear, there are tons of ways of financing a home renovation. Right now, though, we are talking about different ways of doing it by leveraging your home equity. And if you are talking about something that's on that six-figure scale, that's a good thing.

That's the kind of borrowing you're really looking to probably do, right? Clearly $150,000, you're not going to put on a credit card. For that much money to a personal loan, the interest rate probably would not be at all in your favor.

But in terms of these three options, so we've got cash out refi, we've got home equity loan, and then home equity line of credit, we can just say HELOC. Cash out refinance, I can tell you right now, there's a high likelihood it will be not on the table. And that's because of where mortgage rates are. So if you bought a couple years ago,

there's a good chance that today mortgage rates are higher than when you bought it. So with a cash out refinance, you're refinancing the home. So you're getting an entirely new mortgage. That means a new everything, new term, new interest rate, all of it. You take out a loan for more than the home is worth. And then you get the difference in cash at closing between the home's value and how much you still own on the mortgage. So that's kind of where your cash out is coming from.

So when we're in an environment where interest rates are really low, this is appealing to people because they can get cash out and at the same time, they're lowering their interest rate, right? But when interest rates have gone up, one, no one's like looking to increase their interest rate, but increasing your interest rate on an even larger loan is kind of like...

you're just making bad worse there. So for a lot of people, cash out refi is not going to be an option. And again, you know, that's going to depend what the interest rate on your primary mortgage is. But kind of broadly right now, cash out refi is just not going to make sense for a ton of people. Yeah, I'm not positive what our mortgage interest rate is, but I want to say it's like 6.9, just for reference, I think.

That's not terribly far off the kind of rates we're seeing right now. Something else to consider also is that cash out refis generally have higher interest rates than if you were to just do, say, a rate and term refinance. Because it's that much larger of a loan for the mortgage lender, it's a little more risky. They're going to reflect that in the interest rate you're offered. So really, unless it's a low rate environment, cash out refi is probably not it.

All right, Kate. So since that is not a very maybe viable option for many people, let's talk about HELOCs and home equity loans.

HELOCs and home equity loans have some similarities, have some differences. One big similarity, though, that fits into what I was just talking about is that both of them are types of second mortgages. So it is a separate loan from your current mortgage. That means if there's anything you don't want to touch about your current mortgage, interest rate, term, whatever it is, you don't have to. This is just a completely separate loan.

That said, each option is pretty different. So home equity loans are pretty straightforward. You just borrow an amount. You get that amount as a lump sum at closing. That's the whole thing. It's got a fixed interest rate that you can pay over as much as 30 years. So you've got this monthly payment. You're just paying it. It's more or less how most loans work, right? You borrow the money and then you pay it back.

Where home equity loans get tricky is that relatively few lenders offer them relative to other home equity borrowing options. Thinking about the dozens of lenders that we review and research at NerdWallet, cash out refinance, I would say, is by far the most common. Most lenders that are offering refi offer you a cash out option. Keylock comes in second, and then home equity loan is like a distant third.

So if there's interest in going down that path, it might take a little bit more research to find lenders that are actively offering home equity loans.

So HELOCs are more common, but HELOCs are also kind of more complicated. So with a home equity line of credit, it's a line of credit, right? So it's a little bit like a credit card in that you have your total dollar amount that you can borrow up to, but you don't have to borrow that dollar amount. You kind of borrow the money as you need it to do the different things. So that can be really helpful for something like a renovation where, like you said, you

You have an idea of how much you hope it will cost, but other costs might come up. You also might need the money at different times. So with a HELOC, you're taking the money out as you need it. And then because of that, you're also only paying interest on what you've actually borrowed. So with a home equity loan, since you've borrowed the whole thing right at the beginning, you are paying interest on the whole thing the whole time. With a HELOC, you're paying interest on what you've spent out.

out of it. The downside is that most HELOCs are adjustable rate. And so that means that the interest rate changes...

pretty regularly. It's going to change along with the prime rate. So people who have HELOCs get really into what the Federal Reserve is doing and other kinds of wonky interest rates, stuff like that, because suddenly you're very conscious of interest rates going up or down. There are some different tricks you can do with a HELOC. Some lenders will allow you to convert part of it to a fixed rate. But in general, it gets a little bit wonky, a little bit complex.

That said, HELOC is often a really good option for home renovation just because of that flexibility. You can usually borrow from the HELOC for like a 10-year period before you go into all the repayment. So in my situation, I'm just thinking through like, would maybe a good option for us be to more aggressively tackle our mortgage and get more equity in our home instead

in order to ultimately use it for a HELOC.

That certainly would be one option. Personally, for me, I am generally an advocate of paying extra principal if that's something that you're able to do. The way that mortgages work, there's this thing called amortization. So at the beginning of the loan, you're paying a lot more toward interest than you are toward principal. And then as the loan progresses, those reverse. So any amount that you can pay extra directly to the principal each month

can be really helpful. And it can also be really satisfying because after a while, you can look at the amortization calendar and see that you've literally cut years off the mortgage. So that's something I personally have enjoyed with paying extra principal is feeling like, hey, I'm literally taking bites out of this mortgage.

The other thing to consider is, again, the home value thing. So if you were to apply for a home equity loan or for a HELOC, the lender would want an appraisal of the home. It'll cost money, as appraisals always do. It'll be a few hundred dollars. But again, that will let you know what the home is actually worth right now in your current market with the updates that you've made. And so that can be really helpful in terms of giving you more that you could borrow from. Okay.

I'm going to pivot the conversation a little. I want to ask you, Irene, whether you've thought about whether you're prepared to add to the financial burden you already have with a mortgage by potentially doing a renovation. And also, are you ready for the emotional labor of home renovations? Oh, yes.

Yeah, these are good questions. Like I said earlier, we have a $3,000 buffer from our budget to what we make monthly post-taxes. So we do have some wiggle room to work with as far as if we were paying a HELOC.

And also that wiggle room has been really helpful for us when unexpected expenses come up. So it would be something that we would kind of need to think about more critically. And then, yes, I hear you in the like emotional cost of renovating. It was one of those things when we were renovating the original house about a year and a half ago that I

I told my neighbor, I was like, don't worry, my husband and I are doing fine. And also, I can see why renovations and moving and these kind of things can result in a divorce. Like, I can see that. Because we are definitely, you know, fighting more than we normally would.

It's one of those things where I think we definitely have weighed, do we add on to this house? To your point, it can get complicated with the HELOC. There is the emotional cost and then also, of course, the time involved. Or do we just move? Because we've definitely had that thought too, where typical of any place in the US, we paid for location. We live in a smaller house and we are close.

close to town, you know, we're in a great location. So we could explore moving further from

from the city center and having more space. I don't know if that's even really a financial decision more than just a... Well, but maybe you guys could speak to that if you guys have any thoughts on that financially. Obviously, there's a lot of emotions involved in that. There are a lot of emotions involved in that, right? And also, because you mentioned that you have children, depending on how long you waited out for that, you could start getting into questions of, do I want to change their schools?

and stuff like that and weighing things like having this closer location versus potentially having a further commute, the different conveniences,

location versus space. There is so much going on there. And so really that is one where, you know, you can look at the numbers and say, okay, this is what we might make if we sold this house. So this is what we would have to work with in terms of a home buying budget for our next home. But there are also all of these other like intangibles that you're going to have to kind of mentally almost put a price on and decide which among those factors you really value the most.

Kate, what are some ways to approach home renovation plans? What would you say if you had to give an outline for ways people can approach it? I think it really depends on the scope of the renovation or the scope of the repair. Another thing to consider is your timeline. So Irene is working with this nice timeline of...

okay, we want to do this, but this isn't something where we need to do it immediately. When I bought my house, which very much a fixer-upper, cannot emphasize enough how fixer-upper this home was.

I knew that the roof needed to be replaced. I knew this was going to come up. I was really hoping the roof could just make it like one year before I needed to do that. But before I had even moved in, I started seeing stains on the bedroom ceiling that told me that the roof... Yes, that told me that the roof was leaking. So that's something where...

Something like home equity borrowing was not even an option. It just simply would have taken too long. With a cash out refinance, you're looking at a typical loan closing time, roughly the same as you would be for a mortgage. With stuff like HELOCs, you will see some lenders emphasizing how quickly they can close on a HELOC for you. But I needed that roof like.

today. So I ended up taking a personal loan to take care of that just because I really needed the money that immediately. But because it was like a five-figure borrow, putting it on a card was not going to work for me. So sometimes there are things like that where something external could push your timeline one way or another, and then that's going to be a really deciding factor.

All right, Irene, do you feel like you have some steps to take based on our conversation? Yes, yes. It's really good food for thought. And something about the home equity line of credit, it was helpful to hear the difference between that and a home equity loan. I don't even think I really realized that those were two different things. And hearing that it's kind of like a credit card is helpful as far as thinking about if that would be a good choice for us financially. Got it.

So this has been a great conversation and a reminder that this is not individualized advice, but we hope that the chat that we've had with Kate is enough to equip you with information you need to make your own decision. So I hope that's the case for you, Irene. Yes, it's been super helpful. I really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you. I'm glad. We look forward to hearing what you decide when you decide to do the renovations. Please feel free to send us pictures of the renovations. Would love to see. And thank you so much for coming on, Irene. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Kate Wood, thanks for joining us again and sharing all of your nerdy knowledge. Of course. Always love being here.

And that's all we have for this episode. Remember, listener, that we are here to answer your money questions. So turn to the nerds and call or text us the questions that you have at 901-730-6373. That's 901-730-NERD. You can also email us at podcast at nerdwallet.com.

Also, visit nerdwallet.com slash podcast for more information on this episode. And remember, you can follow the show on your favorite podcast apps, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and iHeartRadio to automatically download new episodes. And here's our brief disclaimer. We are not your financial or investment advisors. This nerdy information is provided for general educational and entertainment purposes, and it may not apply to your specific circumstances.

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