I hear an echo. Didn't I bring this up before? 🙂 J/K. Actually, I thought about this, but haven't looked into it yet . I think it *might* work if you already are making extra payments off of the mortgage, but just can't do it off a lump sum. For example, I probably pay and extra 3000000 yen /year off principle. But my paycheck comes in monthly, so Ican't for example pay the entire 3000000 yen say at the beginning if the year. BUT, if I borrow 2800000 yen from a low interest heloc and make 1 lump sum at the beginning of the year, and pay off my heloc with funds that I would have used to normally make an extra principle payment, it *might* turn out that my reduced principle of my mortage carried across the remainder of the year will save me more money than the extra interest that I am paying off of my Heloc balance, which I end up paying off each year. There's probably some magic number principle payment that makes this worthwhile the hassle. But I haven't looked into details of implementation.
The other thing might be some have mentioned getting heloc's these days are very difficult. I would say this would eliminate people that are upside down or even close to upside down. In my particular case, I already paid off about 35% of the principle, so this probably won't be a big issue for me, since I don't think my home price has fallen by 35% from the price that I purchased (yet).
