We'd push back on the premise: paying the house off just to borrow the money back works against itself. Once you sink cash into the house, it's trapped there until a new loan pulls it out, and that HELOC or cash-out refi comes with closing costs and its own rate either way. You'd give up liquidity now to set up a loan you could set up later, and gain nothing financially in the trade. With the purchase roughly a year out, staying liquid is the stronger position. If the real issue is that carrying the existing mortgage bothers you, paying it down for peace of mind is a legitimate personal choice. Just call it that. There's no financial return in prepaying purely to enable a future loan against the same equity, and the right decision is the one you can sleep with. A reasonable play in the meantime: keep the funds in the highest-yield safe account you can find (yields move, so check current rates), so the cash keeps earning while staying ready to deploy. When you're closer to buying, we'll compare a HELOC against a cash-out refi on your actual numbers in the free Roadmap conversation. Nobody can promise where rates go, so we wouldn't restructure everything today around a guess about next year.