You chunked $20,000 in March. In June the hours get cut. The balance on the line of credit is still $14,000, the payback assumed a surplus that no longer exists, and the mortgage you paid down doesn't send any of it back.

First move: stop the sweep, don't stop the payment. The automatic transfer that dumps the whole paycheck onto the line of credit has to pause, because you need cash in checking when income is uncertain. The minimum payment keeps going. Those are two different decisions and people collapse them into one.

Second: find the interest-only floor. Most HELOCs in the draw period only require interest on the outstanding balance. On $14,000 at 8.5% that's about $99 a month. Knowing that number changes the temperature of the whole situation, because the required outflow is small even though the balance is big.

Third: rebuild a cash buffer before you resume paying the balance down. That reverses the order you've been running, on purpose. Interest on $14,000 for a few extra months costs a few hundred dollars. Getting caught with no available cash and a frozen line of credit costs a lot more than that.

The freeze risk is the real one. Lenders can reduce or suspend a HELOC when home values drop or when your credit profile changes, and a job loss can show up in both. If there's room available and you think the income gap will last more than a couple of months, drawing some of it into a savings account before anything gets suspended is a defensible move. You'll pay interest on money that's sitting there. You'll also have it.

Fourth: don't chunk again until the income has been stable for three months. Not the month it comes back. Three months after.

If you have a policy with cash value, this is one of the situations it was built for, and a policy loan doesn't get suspended when a lender gets nervous about the housing market. The carrier's obligation is contractual. That's the whole argument for having more than one source of liquidity.

What you don't do is refinance the mortgage to pull the chunk back out. Closing costs, a new rate that's probably worse than the one you have, and a thirty-year clock restarting to solve a six-month problem.