HELOC on Primary Home for Investment Property

[Chris Sparrow]

Hello BP Collective!

I just looked into getting a HELOC on a primary residence that we just purchased in January. To my surprise we got approved. My initial goal is to pay off a family member that loaned us $50k to help us get this primary residence, but it looks like we will have 50k left should we need it. It will be in my name alone. I'm wondering if we decide to use the rest of the HELOC funds on our first investment property using a conventional loan in my husband's name, will the HELOC affect his debt to credit ratio (and chances of getting approved for the mortgage loan) if its under my name?

This is still a ways off as we need to learn more and determine a market we'd like to get into. We are in Southern California so this would probably be out-of-state. Also, is it more prudent to aim for a cheaper property that would only require 30k downpayment and then we would have have 20k for repairs left over in the HELOC? We do have some cash reserves. We were going to use these cash reserves for improvements on our primary to help us get approved for a HELOC, but we may hold off on that now since we it looks like we can get approved without doing anything.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  SOOOOOOOO new to this. :)

Thanks!

Christine