If I needed money, I would never, under any circumstances, mortgage my home. Given extreme circumstances, I might consider selling my home and buying a smaller one.
If I were you i would go ahead and reserve your living quarters under the nearest bridge, learn how to fight real good so you can get the best street corner to make your living on and RUN to WalMart and see if they have any comfortable card board boxes that will fit your family to sleep in....and they say the general public has no common sense .
Not necessarily such a bad idea if the OP is only going to mortgage a small % of his home equity, say 25% or if the OP has plenty of additional liquidity and just wants to add some more leverage. More info is needed to make a call one way or the other. Say he has $1M in liquid investments and $1M home. Take out 250K at 5% or less in 15 or 30 year money to add to his investments isn't such a bad plan (the DDM idea sucks!)
If he can gaurantee 5% or more a year return then perhaps...but since he can;t gaurantee that he will even stick to the plan much less the 5% then ..I dont think so... Imagine he takes out 25% and his house goes down further in value and then invest it in the market and he gets hit for another 25% on his DDM .,....then what amigo?? left with his dick in his hand... then he panicks to only get out and either proceed to spend his money or pay back 3/4 of the loan...
Have you read a few of them? The OP is about as sharp as a marble, 3/4 of his posts are insulting traders. He can't trade, so I guess "investing" is worth a shot, maybe take a loan against the kids' 529 accounts!
No, because at that point the way things are going he would certainly qualify for a government bailout Seriously though, many people have 80-90% of their net worth in their homes. Taking a loan at what is historically (artificially) cheap long term money, throw in the interest deduction assuming he has taxable income and you are at a close to 3%. Diversifying your portfolio with it might not be such a bad idea especially if you believe that RE is dead money for the next decade. You might even think of it as a hedge of sorts (in this case hedging the opportunity cost of having so much of your net worth in a non performing asset). Personally I would be looking at $ cost averaging in to things like DBA, KOL over a period of 12-24 months and then just think of my mortgage payment as a savings/investment program. My underlying assumption is that by 2011-12 global growth will start to pick up again.
crgarcia's sole pasttime, is starting "provocative" threads and sitting back while others tell him how stupid he is.