Secured loans play a crucial role in home equity second mortgages. You may have one or more secured loans in addition to your first mortgage. These loans are called secured loans because the lender will have registered a charge on your home for the amount of loan. The term charge is used here to both cover a charge and a standard security. The existence of a charge has two important consequences.

Firstly, the lenders can apply to a court for an order to sell your home to get their money back if you do not make the agreed payments or if you break the terms of the mortgage agreement in some other way. Secondly, you must repay to your lenders the sum outstanding on your mortgage when you sell your home. Before a property can change hands the charges must be removed; when the charge is a mortgage, it will only be removed when the loan is repaid. Every mortgage you have will be registered as a charge. These will be listed, usually in the order in which you borrowed the money, so that the first lender will have the first charge, the second lender will have the second charge and so on. This is the order in which the lenders will be repaid if your home is sold.

By the way of charge, the lender has secured the certainty of recovering the money lent, with interest, if you default on the payments. Secured loans may be taken out for any purpose and are normally repaid on a capital repayment basis, but interest rates will usually be higher than for your first mortgage. You are likely to have a shorter mortgage term on your secured loan and this, together with a higher interest rate, will make your monthly payments comparatively high.