1. How much is your HELOC balance?
2. What is the value of the rest of your assets?
3. So you've got sufficient cash flow planned once you FIRE for your living expenses and HELOC payments?
4. What was the purpose/plan for borrowing from your HELOC and investing? Did you have a specific objective?
I'd love to hear your answers to these ^^^ questions. My first comment would be you should have a plan for using your HELOC just like you should have an investment plan. That plan should have an objective to borrowing money to invest. It should have a number of contingency plans for likely market occurrences. It should also have a wind down for how you will pay off the HELOC and de-leverage.
Just because you made some money over a few months doesn't really indicate what your next move should be.
Good questions. I'm not comfortable disclosing our financial specifics, but I will say this:
1 & 2. Current HELOC balance is about 12% of our overall net worth. We don't have it maxed out.
3. We do have sufficient cash flow for FIRE, whether or not we have HELOC payments. We'll just have a little more with the HELOC funds reaping investment rewards.
4. The plan for the HELOC was to reduce the stagnant money just sitting in home equity and put it to work; our home equity is now about 25% of our NW instead of 33%.
5. You didn't ask, but the current interest rate on HELOC is 2.4%, but that jumps to at least 3.1% next April. The rate is variable and has nowhere to go but up.
What complicates matters is that we don't expect to spend the next 30 years in this home, so the HELOC isn't going to run its full course anyway. We may move in the next 3-5 years, and over that timeframe, the stock market's erratic bouncing could land us at a disadvantageous moment when we have to sell something to pay off the HELOC. We hope to get a new mortgage instead, but we'll be retired, so I'm cautious.
Basically, the reason I'm considering accelerating payments is the potentially shortened time window for repayment if/when we move. If I knew we'd be here for 30 more years, I wouldn't be considering paying it down unless the interest rate jumped too high. But the market's unpredictability over a 3- to 5-year span is higher than that over a 10- to 30-year span, so capturing some profits now seems enticing.