Growth portfolio in retirement

Then you should be doing a cash out refinance and investing the proceeds.

The problem(s) is path dependency.

  1. Build-up of equity is very slow in the early years of the mortgage, so unless the house value has gone up substantially you can’t do this soon.

  2. Lenders are very negative on cash-out refinances. They charge more points, higher interest rates, and lower LTV.
    Used to be that you could roll a HELOC balance into a rate-and-terms refi to effectively get cash out, but ever since 2008 they consider that a cash-out refi.

  3. There are costs to a refi. All-in, I suspect the costs are around 2%-3% of the new loan balance. Sure, sometimes you can roll the cost into the new loan, but that just spreads out the cost doesn’t eliminate it.