It may sound like mattress-stuffing financial advice, but if you have a home equity loan and hard times loom, you may want to drain that account and squirrel the money away where you can get at it when you need it.

Wait until a financial crisis arises and you lender may have decided to renege on your credit limit and there will be nothing you can do about it.

"Banks are reducing their commitment on home equity loans. If you think you will need it, it's a good time to take advantage of it before it goes away," said Bob Kresak, a certified financial planner and managing partner of the Founders Financial Network, Cupertino, CA-based financial planning and wealth management firm.

Advice to grab equity money and run also comes from the CMPS Institute, an organization created to certify mortgage bankers and brokers to counsel consumers on mortgage and real estate equity management, as well as on home loan origination.

"If you counted on an unused home loan line of credit for liquidity and safety, this is not a smart strategy, if you need it in this environment. Draw it all out now and put it an FDIC-insured account and have access to your money when you need it," says Gibran Nicholas, chairman of the CMPS Institute.

Chief operating officer at the Santa Clara-based online mortgage brokerage Erate.com, Nancy Osborne calls the use-it-or-lose-it advice "pretzel logic."

When it comes to equity loans, even when you do use it, you lose it. A home equity loan, by it's very nature, is an equity-depleting loan. And equity loan payments begin, with interest.

"Home equity isn't free money after all. Isn't that our economy has been over-leveraged by debt what got us all in this mess in the first place?" asks Osborne.

Maxing out your home equity line of credit could also lower your credit score if only by a few points.

But consider this, if you have a home equity line of credit at, say $50,000 and you've used $20,000 and the lender decides to cut your limit to $20,000, it looks to the credit scoring computer like you've maxed out your home equity anyway.

Proponents insist the advice really isn't a radical shift from the fundamentals. The new advice just allows you to keep your home equity loan in a more liquid state. And from Wall Street giants to Main Street homeowners, today, liquidity is key.

Home equity is the difference between the value of your home and your mortgage balance. In the past, lenders have allowed home owners to borrow against their equity so much so that the home owner could wind up with a combined first and second mortgage balance that was as much as 125 percent of the value of the home.

That was during fast appreciation days when lenders cranked out mortgages with assembly line like speed (and quality) and it was a good bet values would rise. With the home owner paying down the mortgage and home values rising, it was a cinch the value would quickly rise above the total mortgage balance.

Unfortunately, the boom-turned-bust housing market left many home owners twisting the wind with negative equity -- a home worth less than the mortgage.

Risk averse lenders suffering the financial fallout are putting the kibosh on how much you can borrow against your equity, typically no more than 80 percent of your first and second mortgages combined.

Quincy A. Virgillio Jr., president elect of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors says while an "equity depletion strategy" can be a way of saving an asset from declining value, it is risky business. He says equity use should come with a return that's greater than the cost of borrowing.

"And that's something that may be hard to achieve given the current yields that are being earned in today's markets. It becomes an issue if the returns are eliminated or diminished, making this a risky proposition," said Virgillio, also broker owner of the Mortgage Network in Campbell.

Nicholas concedes, "If you are not disciplined and you go out and blow the money, of course this (squirreling away equity money) is not a good idea," said Nicholas.