Your equity can provide the funds to make those improvements happen, increasing your home’s value and making it more enjoyable to live in too.Getting a Business GoingIf you’ve been dreaming about starting your own business, your equity could be the kickstart you need.

If you are setting aside funds for capex, taxes, insurance, or other expenses that don't occur monthly, transfer those funds to Savings each month and hold them there until it's time to spend them.

What I'm planning: buy and hold the property, brush and clean it up with intent to hold until cost of funds drops a little in 4-6 months.

Quote from @Mani Sundaresan: If I’m financing a rehab project with a hard money loan, do I still need to issue 1099-NEC forms to my contractors—given that the funds come from a loan, which isn’t taxable income?

We are only selling completed homes with our own in house financing currently at 3.75%, a huge discount from most bank rates.We are a long time property provider for some of the bigger podcasters: Real Estate Guys Radio, Marco Santorelli (Norada), Kathy Fetke (RWN) Jason Hartman ( Empowerd Investor) GRE (Keith Weinhold), Whitecoat Investor Group and more We also work with American Homes for Rent, Invitation Homes, Crescent, Haven Realty (JP Morgan) to name a few on the institutional side We are partially owned as of 2022 by Sumitomom Forestry, which means we have no bank debt and self fund all our building projects.

I think a HELOC requires a certain LTV before you can pull any equity and 1 year most likely won't be long enough for any real equity to build.I would say.

Quote from @Jacob Sherman: you can utilize no income no doc construction loans . fund 50% of the land 100% of construction upto 65% ARV .

If you planned on moving out of a house and buy another property, as an example, you could pull a HELOC before you moved out and keep it as an emergency fund.  

There is also one put on by streamline funding second Wednesday morning of every month that I like.

If leveraging equity feels too risky, you might consider using a portion of the equity to fund your next property while keeping reserves intact.