Sitting on equity on primary residence

[Sara Kirkpatrick]

My husband and I own our primary home outright, it is not in our LLC where we hold our rental homes.

We had the local bank do an in house appraisal and it came back about much higher than we anticipated.

I asked our accountant about pulling equity out to purchase a rental home and she absolutely advised against it- for tax reasons (we would have to count the interest paid from our LLC as income and we are at a place we don't want to do that- trying to keep our income low). and risk (we could lose our home). I wasn't planning on pulling anymore than 1/3 of the value out but that's just a matter of risk tolerance).

Any suggestions, ideas on how to not let that equity just sit there? We do have plans to brick the house to do a forced valuation here in the next year or two.

Thanks!