Improve Your Lifestyle - Release The Money In Your Home

As house prices continue to rise in the UK with the average cost of a house breaking the £200,000 barrier for the first time in February 2007, many of us who bought our homes are sitting on top of amounts of cash that our parents and grandparents could only have dreamed of.

It’s not unusual these days for even a small terraced or town house to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds and if you have lived there for more than a year or two, you could find that you have equity (the difference between what you owe on your mortgage and the current value of your house) in the region of tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Our average £200,000 UK house is growing more expensive at an astonishing £300 a week, but even on existing figures, if you match the house price figure with the typical mortgage size of around £130,000, you get an equity of £70,000.

It’s much easier than many people think to free up this windfall and have cash which you can use for more or less anything. You could use it for example for home improvements which would further increase the value of your home or you could get rid of expensive short term debt such as loans, overdrafts and credit cards. Many homeowners these days are re-mortgaging to help their children get a foot on to the property ladder by lending or giving them the money for a deposit to enable them to get their own home.

Whatever you decide to use the money for, the process of releasing it is very straightforward. You can either approach your existing mortgage lender or you can take out a secured loan which is where the lender takes a second charge on your house as security. Your house will need to be valued to ensure that you have sufficient equity but this is a very quick process, then once the paperwork has been completed, the money will be transferred to your account or paid to you by cheque.

As always with any kind of loan, you should always ensure that you can meet the payments. Allow a margin, or consider insurance if possible for changes of circumstances such as illness or unemployment.

As long as you consider all the options and don’t borrow more than you can afford to repay, you can improve your family’s lifestyle by cashing in on the value in your home.

Andy Bond writes on