Today, Freddie Mac, one of the two largest owners of mortgages in the United States (along with sister company Fannie Mae), reported that homeowners who opted to take cash out when refinancing their homes during the fourth quarter of 2011 was at the lowest point in the 26 years the company has been keeping up with those numbers.

According to the report, less than 15% bumped up the amount of their loan by 5% or more. This constitutes a “cash-out” option in which the loan amount increases while the homeowners take cash from the home’s equity through liquidation.

To compare with historical trends for home refinancing, cash-out refinancing constituted 46% of all refinancing on average from 1986 to 2010.

Instead of using their home’s equity as a way to obtain cash, more homeowners are actually putting cash in, or decreasing the total amount of the new loan. These “cash-in borrowers” constitute roughly 49% of all homeowners refinancing their home, which is also a record. The new loans are roughly three-quarters the size of the old loan.

The remaining 37% of homeowners refinancing their homes left with the same loan amount. All told, homeowners going through a home refinance locked in an interest rate that was 1.4% on average – saving an estimated $2,700 the first year of the new loan.

The trend doesn’t sound surprising, as more and more homeowners – burned by sharp downturns in the housing market – are afraid to touch their equity, particularly with underwater homeowners littering the landscape. Such behavior ran rampant in the decade prior to the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007 and is one of the contributing factors to the record numbers of foreclosures that have hit every year.

Just how much money was taken out of homes that underwent homeowner refinancing? According to Freddie Mac, cash-out homeowners removed approximately $5.5 billion in equity form their homes, just 3% of the total financed amount. In the third quarter of 2011, those numbers were $5.6 billion and 3.7% – down from the peak historical levels of $83.7 billion and 31.1%.

Clearly, American homeowners are hunkering down on their equity and trying to conserve as much as possible – especially given how many foreclosure properties are caused by an inability to refinance out of high monthly mortgage payments due to having negative equity.

Figures for the first quarter of 2012 are still two months away but are expected to continue this trend.