which makes the eyes of everyone who did poorly in algebra glaze over, including my own, let's call them cookies and ice cream. Your mortgage debt will be ice cream . We'll get to the cookies in a minute. Right now, since the mortgage interest on your home could be your largest expense, we'll call that a stomach ache . Stepping back to look at something not quite that costly which we might parlay into a savings at ice cream brings us back to the home itself, cookies . You convert some of your cookies , specifically home equity, to ice cream, your home loan. The amount you transfer will reduce your stomach ache (mortgage interest) exponentially. In other words, the more cookies (equity) you use to reduce the ice cream (principal of the mortgage), the more stomach ache (proportion of interest) you will avoid. To illustrate, to borrow $200,000 for 30 years at 6% will ultimately cost you $231,676.38 in interest payments alone . That's a mighty big stomach ache! Transferring $5000 from your accumulated equity six months into your loan (assuming your home has increased in value), erases $22,651.35 from that projected interest. That's exponential savings. Five thousand dollars of cookies cut nearly $23,000 from your stomach ache, a 453% return. Though it will take 28.1 years to fully appreciate your accomplishment, comparing it to any other kind of investment, this is a 16.1211% annualized return . In order to draw $5000 of cookies out of your home's