With cost-effective borrowing options rare in recent years, one alternative has surfaced as more advantageous for homeowners: accessing their home equity. Whether via a home equity loan or a home equity line of credit (HELOC), both products offer homeowners an effective way to access their accumulated home equity without having to refinance. And, right now, the amount of money that can be tapped into is large, with the average home equity amount hovering close to $330,000 and likely to rise even further as home prices continue to grow. 

So accessing this money with a home equity loan, which comes with a fixed (and lower) interest rate compared to a HELOC, makes sense for many borrowers. The timing, however, needs to be carefully considered. Specifically, is it worth opening a home equity loan now or are borrowers better served by waiting for interest rates to decline further into 2025? That’s what we’ll break down below.

See what home equity loan rate you could qualify for here.

Should you open a home equity loan now or wait until 2025?

There’s a compelling case to be made for opening a home equity loan now versus waiting until the new year. Here’s why:

Interest rates are already lower than many alternatives

If you need money now, then this is likely your best option. That’s because interest rates on home equity loans, averaging around 8.40% right now, are already much lower than some popular alternatives. Average credit card interest rates, for instance, just hit a record, surpassing 23%. 

Personal loans, meanwhile, are much lower at around 13% – but that’s still more than four points higher than home equity loans. And that difference could prove to be worth thousands of dollars when spread out over a 10 or 15-year repayment period. Understanding the drawbacks of the alternatives, then, it makes sense to lock in a home equity loan rate now, before it has a chance to change in 2025.

Get started with a home equity loan online now.

There’s no guarantee that rates will decline much further

The price of gold was on a record rise all of 2024 … until it wasn’t. Mortgage rates had plunged to a 2-year low in September … until rising more than a point in October. As these two recent developments demonstrate, the economy and financial markets are constantly evolving. And while inflation and home equity loan interest rates, specifically, could continue to decline in December and into 2025 there’s no guarantee that they will. 

And as homebuyers recently experienced, they could even rise, perhaps by a prohibitive margin. Monitoring this dynamic, then, many potential home equity borrowers may be better served by locking in a low home equity loan rate now – and refinancing it should rates drop significantly in the future. 

Waiting delays a major tax deduction

While the interest rate you pay on any product is a critical consideration, it may not be quite as important for home equity loans if you use it for IRS-eligible home repairs and improvements. That’s because the interest you pay on these loans is tax-deductible if used for specific home projects. 

Waiting to secure the loan, then, will delay this potentially major tax deduction, leaving homeowners stuck with the interest until they can deduct it from their 2025 return – which they’ll file in 2026. Acting now, however, could potentially reduce your 2024 tax bill, even with just seven weeks left on the calendar. 

Learn more about your home equity loan interest tax deductions here.

The bottom line

For some homeowners, waiting until 2025 to formally apply for a home equity loan makes sense. For others, however, it’s more beneficial to act now. Interest rates on this unique product are already much lower than popular alternatives and there’s no guarantee that rates will fall much further anyway. Plus, by acting now, homeowners can position themselves to potentially benefit from a major interest deduction on their taxes. Still, home equity loans are largely cheaper because the home in question is used as collateral. So borrowers will need to take a strategic approach to this loan type, no matter if they apply now or at a later date in 2025. 

Grocery prices continue to eat a hole in household budgets, with many Americans citing the economy and inflation as top issues behind their votes in the November 5 election. But there are signs that consumers may soon get a break on their grocery bills, with some food prices falling in October from a year earlier — the first decline in four years.

Online grocery prices dipped 0.1% in October from a year — that marks the first dip since January 2020, before the pandemic shuttered the U.S. economy and sent inflation soaring, according to new data from Adobe’s Adobe Digital Price Index (DPI), which tracks online prices.

Online grocery prices represent what consumers pay when they order food from retailers such as Walmart, Whole Foods and others through apps or websites. 

To be sure, online grocery shopping represents only a portion of Americans’ overall food purchases, with about 20% of U.S. shoppers buying their provisions through an app or website in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the October price decline signasl that shoppers could get more relief ahead in the grocery aisles, with a Credit Karma survey in May finding that about one-quarter of Americans had skipped a meal due to food costs.

Grocery inflation more broadly has also cooled after hitting a pandemic-era peak of 13.5% in August 2022. In September, the cost of food that consume at home rose 1.3%, below the Federal Reserve’s goal of driving inflation down to a 2% annual rate. And grocery prices may remain relatively flat in 2025, with the USDA projecting that food-at-home costs will increase only 1.6% next year. 

More broadly, online prices across all product categories dropped 2.9% in October from a year earlier, Adobe said. The decline was led by drops in prices for clothing and toys, which fell about 10% and 4%, respectively.

What to expect in the next CPI report

The Consumer Price Index for October will be released on November 13, with economists forecasting that inflation rose at an annual rate of 2.6% last month, according to economists surveyed by FactSet. That would reflect an uptick from September’s 2.4% rate but a sharp decline from a year ago, when U.S. prices were still rising at a an annual rate of 3.2%.

With inflation easing, the Federal Reserve has cut its benchmark interest rate, with economists forecasting an additional rate reduction at the central bank’s December meeting. 

Covering your surfboard in bright lights sounds like an open invitation to great white sharks, but research released Tuesday by Australian scientists found it might actually stave off attacks.

Biologist Laura Ryan said the predator often attacked its prey from underneath, occasionally mistaking a surfer’s silhouette for the outline of a seal.

Ryan and her fellow researchers showed that seal-shaped boards decked with bright horizontal lights were less likely to be attacked by great white sharks.

This appeared to be because the lights distorted the silhouette on the ocean’s surface, making it appear less appetizing.

“There is this longstanding fear of white sharks and part of that fear is that we don’t understand them that well,” said Ryan, from Australia’s Macquarie University.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, was conducted in the waters of South Africa’s Mossel Bay, a popular great white feeding ground.

Seal-shaped decoys were strung with different configurations of LED lights and towed behind a boat to see which attracted the most attention.

Brighter lights were better at deterring sharks, the research found, while vertical lights were less effective than horizontal.

Macquarie University Professor Nathan Hart, one of the study’s authors, said the lights caused a “complex interaction” with the shark’s behavior.

“It’s like an invisibility cloak but with the exception that we are splitting the object, the visual silhouette, into smaller bits,” Hart said.

The study’s authors released a video showing some of the research in action.

Ryan said the results were better than expected and is now in the process of building prototypes for use on the underside of kayaks and surfboards.

Australia has some of the world’s most comprehensive shark management measures, including monitoring drones, shark nets and a tagging system that alerts authorities when a shark is near a crowded beach.

Ryan said her research could allow less invasive mitigation methods to be used.

More research was needed to see if bull and tiger sharks — which have different predatory behavior — responded to the lights in a similar way, the authors said.

There have been more than 1,200 shark incidents in Australia since 1791, of which 255 resulted in death, official data shows.

Great white sharks were responsible for 94 of those deaths.

The overall number of deadly shark attacks worldwide in 2023 remained relatively low, but it was still twice the previous year’s total, according to the latest iteration of the International Shark Attack File — a database of global shark attacks run by the University of Florida. 

The report noted that a “disproportionate” amount of people died from shark bites in Australia last year compared with other countries around the world.