$1000 and realized you are going deeper into debt as the months go buy, drop down to $500 or $200 principal payments instead. Play with it until you are comfortable. By the same token, if your bank (or better, credit union) gives you a whopping $30,000 HELOC ask yourself if you really should send in even half of that because how long would it take YOU to pay off that $15,000 balance to $0? If your take-home pay is $6000 every 2 weeks, maybe not long. If your take-home pay is $1200, then you should consider NOT using most of your HELOC but only send in some 1, 2, or $5000 at a time. Then if you have an emergency you still have well over $20,000 in your HELOC if you truly need it - and of course lets pray you wouldn't need it. January 6, 2009 Peter M Vaughan @ 1:52 pm : You take money out of the HELOC and put it into the mortgage, so that there is less principle due on the primary and it accrues less interest. But you borrow on the HELOC, and so the HELOC accrues interest. In the example given above, the $5000 HELOC is assumed paid off in a year with $430 of interest.That means that in addition to paying your mortgage, you paid an additional $5430, $5000 of which went to the principle and $430 to interest. If you repeated this process, paying $5000 a year onto the principle as