How to take advantage of home appreciation
"Assuming ""take advantage"" means continue to build wealth, as opposed to blow it all on a fancy holiday...  Downgrade As you already note, you could downgrade/downsize. This could happen via moving to a smaller house in the same area, or moving to an area where the cost of buying is less.  HELOC Take out a Home Equity Line of Credit. You could use the line of credit to do home improvements further boosting the asset value (forced appreciation, assuming the appreciation to date is simply market based). Caution is required if the house has already appreciated ""considerably"" - you want to keep the home value within tolerance levels for the area. (Best not to have the only $300K house on a street of $190K-ers...) Home Equity Loan Assuming you have built up equity in the house, you could leverage that equity to purchase another property. For most people this would form part of the jigsaw for getting the financing to purchase again." "There are basically two ways to get value out of an appreciating asset such as a home: (a) Sell it and take the profit. In the case of a home, you presumably still have to live somewhere, so unless you buy a cheaper home to replace it, this doesn't get you anywhere. If you can get another house that is just as nice and in just as nice a location -- whatever you consider ""nice"" to be -- than this sounds like a winning option. If it means moving to a less desirable home, then you are getting the cash but losing the nice home. You'll have to decide if it's worth it. (b) Use it as collateral for a loan. In this case, that means a second mortgage, home equity loan, or a home equity line of credit. But this can be dangerous. House prices are very volatile these days. If the value of the house falls, you could be stuck with debts greater than your assets. In my humble opinion, you should be very careful about doing this. Borrowing against your house to send the kids to college or pay for your spouse's life-saving operation may be reasonable. Borrowing against your house to go on a fancy vacation is almost surely a bad idea. The vacation will be over within a couple of weeks, but you could be paying off the debt for decades." There might just not be anything useful for you to do with that 'value'. As others mentioned, HELOCs have their risks and issues too. There is no risk-less way to take advantage of the value (outside of selling) It is similar to owning a rare stamp that is 'worth a million' - what good does it do you if you don't sell it? nothing. It is just a number on a sheet of paper, or even only on some people's minds. Even selling isn't riskless. Sure, your house has gained value-- but unless that's due to improvements you made to it, every other house in the neighborhood you might buy has gained value too, so moving might not result in extracting any net value. This is one of the reasons I keep reminding folks that a house is not an investment. It can be a business, if you're renting it out. But if you're occupying it, it is simply housing. If you are lucky you'll make a profit if and when you sell it, but don't count on that.  It does store value, but except for taking loans against that it's had to access that value. And lower loan rates than you'd otherwise pay are not a huge value when you'd save more if you don't borrow at all. The only use I'm making of my house's value is that by taking a very-low-rate mortgage when I could have paid cash I was able to leave more money in my investments -- arguably the safest leveraged investment possible.
I would put down 12% and pay PMI.   Either way, you are taking out a loan, with payments against 88% of the value of the home. I assume the mortgage note would be either 15 or 30 years and the 401k loan would be less (5? 10?). If you take out an 88% mortgage loan and pay it off at the same pace you would have paid the 401k loan, you'll be down to 80% LTV quickly and PMI will stop.   If the housing market rebounds and your house appreciates, you'll be at 80% LTV quickly.  If you change jobs/lose jobs your mortgage will be unaffected.   PMI is an easily quantifiable risk that is worth paying in this case. Contrasted with the 401k loan, the job loss/job change risk is great.   It isn't just if you lose your job.  Maybe you'll find a great opportunity with a great company that has a 401k plan that doesn't allow loans.   Will you forgo taking that job because of your 401k loan? There are a couple reasons for having a Traditional or Roth IRA in addition to a 401(k) program in general, starting with the Traditional IRA: With regards to the Roth IRA: Also, both the Traditional and Roth IRA allow you to make a $10,000 withdraw as a first time home buyer for the purposes of buying a home. This is much more difficult with the 401(k) and generally you end up having to take a loan against the 401(k) instead. So even if you can't take advantage of the tax deductions from contributions to a Traditional IRA, there are still good reasons to have one around. Unless you plan on staying with the same company for your entire career (and even if you do, they may have other plans) the Traditional IRA tends to be a much better place to park the funds from the 401(k) than just rolling them over to a new employer.  Also, don't forget that just because you can't take deductions for the income doesn't mean that you might not need the income that savings now will bring you in retirement. If you use a retirement savings calculator is it saying that you need to be saving more than your current monthly 401(k) contributions? Then odds are pretty good that you also need to be adding additional savings and an IRA is a good location to put those assets because of the other benefits that they confer. Also, some people don't have the fiscal discipline to not use the money when it isn't hard to get to (i.e. regular savings or investment account) and as such it also helps to ensure you aren't going to go and spend the money unless you really need it. The government and local police is probably doing the same with all the cameras on highways and in city streets. I trust the IT security of a local civic government less than one of the largest e-commerce conglomerate.   Besides, your Amazon profile is already pretty telling, if you're a prime member taking advantage of its benefits. You tell it your years of purchase preferences, your ebooks, music and audio tastes with prime video and music, your groceries can tell how big a family you have, they also have your home and very likely work addresses. Yes this! Unions are what ruined the German economy and put them at the bottom of the list of world manufacturers. They are bleeding so many jobs to China  and south east Asia experts are predicting they won't have any manufacturing sector jobs left within the year. This is going to exacerbate Germany's already sky high unemployment rate and god knows how they are going to pay off their enormous national debt.  On another point I just don't understand how we allow police and fire unions as they don't make those jobs any safer and just end up costing the tax payers more money. If it weren't for them we could pay our police and fire fighters minimum wages. That would equate to about a hundred dollars in tax savings for each and every property owner in a municipality.  Furthermore the rights of the workers are best represented by their employers and not an expensive, corrupt union. You can clearly see the efficiency with which large employers like Flour Daniels takes care of their non-union employees. Sure the non-union people have a much higher medical debt load, less home ownership and more frequent bankruptcies due to unpaid medical debt but that is not without its advantages. What you propose is to convert unsecured debt into secured debt. Conversion of unsecured debt into secured debt is not generally a good idea (several reasons).  The debt you currently owe does not have assets securing the debt, so the creditor knows they are exposed to risk, and may be more willing to negotiate or relax terms on the debt, should you encounter problems.  When you provide an asset to secure debt, you lose freedom to sell that asset.  When you incur debt their is usually a spending problem that needs to be corrected, which is typically not fixed when a refinance solution is used.  You do not mention interest rate, which would be one benefit to conversion of unsecured to secured debt, so you probably are not gaining adequate benefit from the conversion strategy. This strategy is often contemplated using 'cash-out' refinancing to borrow against a home you already own, and the (claimed) benefit is often to lower the interest rate on the debt.  Your scenario is more complicated in that you have not purchased the home (yet).  Though it may be a good idea to purchase a home, that choice depends on a different set of considerations (children, job stability, rental vs. buy costs, lifestyle, expected appreciation, etc) from how to best handle a large debt (income vs. expenses, how to increase income or reduce expenses, lifestyle, priorities, etc). Another consideration is that you already have a problem with the large debt owed to one (set of) creditor(s), and you have a plan which would shift the risk/exposure to another (set of) creditor(s) who may have been less complicit in accruing the original debt.  Was the debt incurred jointly during the marriage, and something you accepted responsibility to repay? You mention that you make great income, and you specify one expense (rent), but you neither provided the amount of income, total of all your expenses, nor your free cash flow amount, nor any indication of percentages spent on rent, essential expenses, lifestyle, nor amount available to retire debt.  Since you did not provide specifics, we can take a look at three scenarios, scenario #1, $4000/month income scenario #1, $6000/month income scenario #1, $8000/month income Depending upon your income and choices, you might have < $500/month to pay towards debt, or as much as $3000/month to pay towards debt, and depending upon interest rate (which OP did not provide), this debt could take < 2 years to pay or > 5 years to pay. Have you accepted the responsibility for the debt?  It will be a tough task to repay the debt.  And you will learn that debt comes with a cost as you repay it.  One problem people often encounter when they refinance debt is they have not changed the habits which produced the debt.  So they often continue their spending habits and incur new unsecured debt, landing them back in the same problem position, but with the increased secured debt combined with additional new unsecured debt.  Challenge yourself to repay a specific portion of the debt in a specific time, and consider ways to reduce your expenses (and/or increase your income) to provide more money to repay the debt quicker. As you also did not disclose your assets, it is hard to know whether you could repay a portion of the debt from assets you already own.  It makes sense to sell assets that have a low (or zero) return to repay debt that has a high interest rate.  Perhaps you have substantial assets that you are reluctant to sell, but that you could sell to repay a large part of the debt? "I very much agree with what @Grade 'Eh' Bacon said about townhouses, but wanted to add a bit about HOA's, renting after moving on, and appreciation: HOA's HOA's can be restrictive, but they can also help protect property values, not all HOA's are created equal, some mean you have zero exterior maintenance, some don't. You'll be able to review the HOA financials to see where the money goes (and if they have healthy reserves). You'll see how much they spend on administration, I think ~10% is typical, and administration can be offset by the savings associated with doing everything in bulk. A well-run HOA should actually save you money over paying for all the things separately, but many people are happy to do some things themselves rather than pay for it, and would come out ahead if they didn't have an HOA. And of course, not all HOA's are well-run. Just do your best to get informed Transitioning to Rental If you are interested in trying your hand being a landlord after living there for a while, a townhouse typically exposes you to less rental risk than a single-family home, because the cost is typically lower and if the HOA maintains everything outside the house then you don't have to worry as much about tenants keeping a lawn in good shape, for example. Appreciation Appreciation varies wildly by market, some research by Trulia suggests in general condo's have outperformed single-family houses over the last 5 years by 10.5%. The same article notes that others disagree with Trulia's assessment and put condo's below single-family houses by 1.3% annually. My first townhouse has appreciated 41% over the last 3 years, while houses in the area are closer to 30% over the same period, but I believe that's a function of my local market more than a nationwide trend. I wouldn't plan around any appreciation forecasts. Source: Condos may be appreciating faster than single-family houses My adviceYou have to do your research on each potential property regardless of whether it's a condo/townhouse/single-family to find out what restrictions there are and what services are provided by the HOA (if any), your agent should be provided with most of the pertinent info, and you may not get to see HOA financials until you're under contract. Most importantly in my view, I wouldn't buy anywhere near the top of your budget. Being ""house-poor"" is no fun and will limit your options, don't count on appreciation or better income in the future to justify stretching yourself thin in the short-term." Having just gone through this process as a buyer via broker in Israel, here are my thoughts: Tl;dr: An incentive such as you are suggesting would not be particularly helpful. In this case, your best option is to spend your efforts shopping for a broker that you can trust. The rest: Your main concern is that the broker will find you a place at the top of your budget and will not negotiate aggressively. The main person responsible for negotiation is YOU. You are paying for the property, and you are putting in bids: not your agent. The agent should advise you, but in the end should pass along your bids directly. The real problem is that you, as the buyer, generally do not have as close a feel for the pulse of the market as the broker, who should be quite aware of recent closings in the neighborhood. Therefore, there are a few things that you can do to help arm yourself: At the end of the day, if you have decided to use a broker, you are making a large financial commitment to hire someone to find you the best place, and therefore it may be more important at this point to spend your efforts shopping around for the best broker, rather than trying to figure out how to outsmart her. You are correct: buyers' agents DO have incentives to sell you on places that may not be right or good for you. For example: Although your scheme may help a bit with the first concern, it will not help at all with the other two, which I assume to be much more likely problems in any event. Instead, find recommendations for brokers from others. Have the broker show you a few properties and put in some low bids to get a feel for how she handles them. Discuss the properties together and try to assess if they really have your interests in mind. You are paying a lot for their service, and you should make sure, as much as possible, that they really are working honestly and in your best interest. A good broker who knows his market and is trying to help you can be a great asset in the opaque, cutthroat real estate market. הבל הבלים, הכל הבל. סוף דבר הכל נשמע, את האלוהים יירא ואת מצוותיו שמור כי זה כל האדם. Good luck! Should I treat this house as a second home or a rental property on my 2015 taxes? If it was not rented out or available for rent then you could treat it as your second home. But if it was available for rent (i.e.: you started advertising, you hired a property manager, or made any other step towards renting it out), but you just didn't happen to find a tenant yet - then you cannot. So it depends on the facts and circumstances. I've read that if I treat this house as a rental property, then the renovation cost is a capital expenditure that I can claim on my taxes by depreciating it over 28 years. That is correct. 27.5 years, to be exact. I've also read that if I treat this house as a personal second home, then I cannot do that because the renovation costs are considered non-deductible personal expenses. That is not correct. In fact, in both cases the treatment is the same. Renovation costs are added to your basis. In case of rental, you get to depreciate the house. Since renovations are considered part of the house, you get to depreciate them too. In case of a personal use property, you cannot depreciate. But the renovation costs still get added to the basis. These are not expenses. But does mortgage interest get deducted against my total income or only my rental income? If it is a personal use second home - you get to deduct the mortgage interest up to a limit on your Schedule A. Depending on your other deductions, you may or may not have a tax benefit. If it is a rental - the interest is deducted from the rental income only on your Schedule E. However, there's no limit (although some may be deferred if the deduction is more than the income) if you're renting at fair market value. Any guidance would be much appreciated! Here's the guidance: if it is a rental - treat it as a rental. Otherwise - don't.