Who I am
I’m an independent researcher with a background in finance. I founded Equity Wiser in 2026 to publish plain-language analysis of home-equity borrowing decisions — HELOCs, cash-out refinances, home equity loans, and the cases where the honest answer is “don’t borrow.”
I’m not a licensed broker, lender, or financial advisor, and nothing on this site is a personal recommendation for your situation. The site is decision support: show the math, cite the source, and let the reader decide.
Why this site exists
A close friend took out a HELOC sold to them by a lender whose only incentive was to close the loan. The numbers were presented in a way that made the deal look smaller than it was — interest-only draw payments quoted as if they were the full repayment obligation, variable-rate risk waved away. They got burned. Not catastrophically, but enough that I spent a weekend trying to reconstruct what had actually been sold to them, and longer after that trying to find a source online I could have pointed them to before they signed.
Most of what came back in search results was one of two things. Lead-generation pages thinly disguised as guides, whose actual purpose was to collect an email and hand it to the highest-paying affiliate network. Or material so vague it was useless in practice — “consider your financial situation carefully” in place of any actual math. I did not find a single site that put the math, the tradeoffs, and the plain-language explanation in one place, alongside a calculator that did the work honestly.
So I built one.
How I research
Every article on this site cites its sources inline. The rate data behind the calculator and the figures quoted in articles come from primary sources: Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey (PMMS), the Federal Reserve’s H.15 release for prime and Treasury yields, and Bankrate’s HELOC rate tables for comparison ranges. Regulatory citations come from Regulation Z (the truth-in-lending framework administered by the CFPB, which governs HELOC disclosures and rescission rights) and IRS Publication 936 for mortgage-interest-deduction mechanics. Industry data points — delinquency rates, demand patterns, freeze and reduction incidents — come from the New York Fed’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit and from CFPB and HMDA public data.
Where a conclusion depends on a judgment call rather than a cited fact, the text says so. I don’t cite sources I haven’t read, and I don’t round numbers in a direction that flatters the point I’m making.
How Equity Wiser makes money
Some of the lender cards in the “Get Quotes” section of the homepage are affiliate links: if a reader signs up with that lender after clicking through, Equity Wiser receives a referral fee. Those links are marked sponsored in the HTML and the fact is disclosed in the card footer on the homepage.
Several of the lender cards are not affiliate links. They’re there because they’re legitimately competitive for some readers — a credit union with below-market closing costs, a military-specific lender with a higher loan-to-value allowance — and excluding them because they don’t pay us would make the recommendation dishonest. The free government resources (the CFPB’s consumer tools, the HUD-approved housing counselor directory, IRS Publication 936) are listed right next to the paid options for the same reason.
No lender has paid for favorable treatment in any article. Rate comparisons, product recommendations, caveats, and the order in which options appear on any page are determined editorially, not commercially. If that ever changes, this page will be updated to say so.
Contact
Questions, corrections, and source pointers are welcome at my contact address. I read everything, though I can’t always reply.