Are Unsecured Personal Loans Good for Home Improvements

Many advertisements on the internet and on other media suggest that you can use certain unsecured personal loans for whatever purpose including making home improvements. Have you ever wondered whether personal loans are really such a good tool for undertaking home improvement projects? Here are some thoughts about the issue.

Making home improvements often requires financing but not any financial product will do. It needs to provide certain flexibility that is needed to complete any home improvement project. Unsecured personal loans are really a flexible source of financing. Do they have what is needed to finance a home improvement project?

Loan Amount

Unsecured loans do not carry very high amounts and thus, it really depends on the type of improvements you need to make whether an unsecured loan can provide the needed funds or not. Unsecured personal loans can easily provide funds to finance home improvement projects from a couple of hundred dollars up to tens of thousands.

Home equity loans (secured loans), on the other hand, can reach hundred of thousands dollars that can fund more expensive home improvements projects like rebuilding a property, adding floors to a building, etc. Thus, depending on the kind of project you have in mind you will need a secured loan or you may do fine with an unsecured loan.

Overall Costs

The interest rate of unsecured loans is higher than the rate charged for home equity loans or lines of credit and thus, the amount of money you will spend on interests over the whole life of the loan will increase with the loan amount and with every year of the repayment program.

Thus, unsecured loans can be really expensive for financing home improvement projects if you need funds to finance an expensive project and you want to repay the loan in several installments. Anything longer than 48 months will turn out rather expensive compared with a home equity loan of up to 5 years.

Repayment Programs

Unsecured loans do not have long repayment programs. However, given that almost no one undertaking a home improvement project wants to finance for more than 5 years, truth is that unsecured loans do not present limitations on this matter. An unsecured loan repayment program can last from a couple of months up to five years.

Home equity loans for home improvements, on the other hand can be repaid in up to 15 years. These periods of time are useless for inexpensive home improvement projects but can be very useful for high cost home improvements. So, it definitely depends on the cost of the project whether you will do better with an unsecured loan or with a home equity loan or line of credit.

Approval

There are not many differences between the requirements needed to get an unsecured loan or a secured loan when you are using the money for home improvements because in either case you do own a property. However, the loan approval processes of unsecured loans are faster due to the fact that there is very little paperwork to do.