Mortgage Refinance or Home Equity Loan Whats the Difference?
Many people use the terms mortgage refinance and home equity loan interchangeably, but the two are not the same thing. Before you consider one or the other, be sure you know what your lender is referring to.
The reason the two terms are often confused has to do with the fact that youll typically be refinancing your existing mortgage when you have some equity established in your home. Equity is simply the difference between the market value of your home and the amount you owe against it. To put it into dollars, a person who owns a home that has a market value of $100,000 and a mortgage on that home of $60,000 has $40,000 in equity.
Thats not to say that all lenders are willing to loan you an additional $40,000. In fact, many lenders have caps on the amount theyll loan. It might be that a particular lender will only loan up to 90 percent of the market value of the home. In that case, the loan value of the home would only be $90,000. Though the amount of equity technically remains the same, the amount of loan available depends on the lenders guidelines.
If you have $40,000 in equity in your...