Homeowners are swarming to HELOCs at the fastest rate in more than a decade to pay for food, gas, and renovations, per BI.

US homeowners are sitting on $29.6 trillion of home equity, according to the Federal Reserve.

Per BI: It's not just refinancings that have fallen. High mortgage rates have created a lock-in effect in the US housing market as the majority of US home loans were created with 30-year rates below 4%. Faced with today's rates above 6%, homeowners don't want a new mortgage or to give up their cheaper one, one phenomenon causing the prolonged slump in home sales.

With home-equity lines of credit, they cashed in on their homes to the tune of $14 billion last quarter, a third consecutive quarterly increase and the largest jump in more than a decade, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In November, US household debt climbed at the fastest annual pace since 2008 in the third quarter, with credit-card balances surging, according to data released by the New York Fed on Tuesday.

Also bolstering consumers is a tight labor market, marked by robust job creation, low unemployment and rising wages. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said earlier this month that supply and demand for jobs remains out of balance and that conditions haven’t softened yet in an “obvious” way.

The Fed’s tightening so far -- nearly four percentage points in the last eight months -- has mainly had an impact on smaller sectors of the economy. Separate data Wednesday showed homebuilder sentiment fell again amid a steep climb in mortgage rates, and factory output barely rose in October.

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