[myself]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nords Sure, should work great. If a bank does more than diddle with the last couple digits of the max balance then you can always join PenFed for their lower interest rates. That "3-6 month's expenses" rule of thumb isn't much better than the "80% of pre-retirement expenses" canard. In the first place, if you lose a job then you're not going to keep merrily spending at your old rate-- you're going to slam shut the wallet and probably make the 3-6 months' emergency fund last for nearly a year. If you're retired, you're rarely going to have an expense that's over $10K... maybe to buy a used car or drill a new well or dig up your septic tank or check out of the emergency room. You'll probably see the rest of the big-ticket expenses (a new roof, higher property taxes, a kid's wedding) coming from a few months away. A HELOC is a great way to write a check and have a month or two to figure out how to come up with the money. Meanwhile the emergency fund can be broken into smaller longer-term CDs (like PenFed, which breaks them down into amounts as small as $1000) which you can break into only if necessary and then only the ones that are needed. Another advantage to having a credit union HELOC is that they're unlikely to diddle with the terms of the agreement.

All true.
But out of curiosity, don't retired folks also get those low rate CC offers too? That could easily allow for a couple of months to get over things that happen to come up, without risking one's house.