You can take out a home equity loan at any time after you have purchased a house as long as you have the necessary equity to do so. Yes, you will have to "re-close" on the new loan because you will have new paperwork and a new lien will be added to the house. As for your last question, I believe you are asking about other loans you can take out if you own your home. Well, of course there are other loans that you can take out that aren’t assosiated with your home, but that depends on what you are looking to finance. Anytime you use your home as collateral on a loan, the bank will put a lien against the title and will require some sort of equity available to draw from. You can try for a home improvement loan, which again is based on your equity, but there are stricter guidelines for those types of loans.

An "equity" loan is a loan secured by the equity you have in your house. If you buy a $100,000 house with cash, the next day you will have $100,000 equity in that house. If you buy it with a mortgage, the mortgage company "owns" most of the equity.

If you subtract the amount you owe on the mortgage from the assessed value of your home, that’s YOUR equity. If you haven’t owned the house long, it might be a negative number!