Taking a mortgage ? Do Not Change Your Lifestyle Dramatically

My observation could be too narrow, but from what I saw, when someone want to take a mortgage, he/she tends to go for the maximum available even exceed it. The argument usually that they can still afford the repayment, so there should be no problem taking that amount of mortgage/homeloan. It seems they forget one golden rule that I always endorse: if you take a mortgage you cannot change your lifestyle dramatically.

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A Sweet Revenge: Let The Banks Pay Your Debt

Here is the thing. Most of you in one way or another, sooner or later, will probably think that the bank you deal with, is ripping you off. Expensive home loan rate, account keeping fee, monthly fee, yearly fee, transaction fee, exchange fee, settlement fee, break up fee, overdraft fee, loan fee, ATM fee, dishonor fee, name search fee, etc, etc – you named your reason. Well, cannot really blame them as they are in the business to make money by providing financial service, i.e: not charity or foundation that will serve you for free. Now, having said that, how about if there is a sweet way to take revenge to your bank that make them pay your debt: it’s legal, it’s very sweet with very little effort. Interested?… Keep reading.

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Offset Account: A Must Have For Your Mortgage

If you have a homeloan / mortgage account, and especially if you are on variable rate, one thing that you MUST have is offset account facility. Usually homeloan product that offer this facility will attract annual fee for the convenience, but it’s absolutely essential and worth it. Let us see why exactly it is in this article.

How It Works

As the name implied, if you have offset account, amount of money that you put on that account will offset / reduce the actual homeloan. For example: say you have $300,000 homeloan and it has offset account linked to this homeloan. Then if you put $10,000 inside that offset account, the interest of your homeloan  is no longer $300,000, but it’s now $290,000. Read more

Be Careful With “Interest Only” Homeloan/ Mortgage: a Potential Problem You Should Know

One of the selection when you  take a homeloan/mortgage is that you can choose to pay “Principal and Interest” or “Interest Only”. On many occassion, I do recommend to take interest only whenever possible especially if you’re an investor, because the advantage is that you will pay cheaper repayment every month, and if you’re investor that extra money (the difference) can be use for other type of investment that give you more Return of Investment. However, before you really do choose “interest only” loan, you need to understand fully a potential problem associated with this type of loan. Read more

Getting Your First Home Loan or Mortgage: Not That Hard!

One of the reasons people cannot really make up their mind whether to continue renting a home or get a home loan and buy one themselves is that the thinking that getting homeloan must be quite tricky. Fortunately it’s not. In this article we will outline the big picture process of getting a homeloan and you will see yourselves that it’s not that hard.

The Overall Process Read more

Why You Should Always Use Mortgage Broker For Your Homeloan

When it comes to selecting home loan or mortgage, doesn’t matter if it’s a new loan or a refinance / remortgage, I without hesitant will recommend all of us to get a service of mortgage broker. A mortgage broker can be “‘disguised” as “financial planner”, “loan advisor”, “property consultant”, “property strategist”, etc… But as long as  they offer you home loan product from various lender, they are mortgage broker.

Why We Need A Mortgage Broker? Read more

Mortgage: Change To Fixed Rate or Keep It Variable ?

The rule of thumb for mortgage is to fixed the rate if it’s going to go up and keep it variable if it’s going down. As a mortgage holder (definition: the one that has a lot of debt to the lender), of course we want to pay the smallest amount of interest. Especially if the mortgage is on our own home (not on investment property) because usually we won’t get a tax benefit from it. After all, mortgage interest is not giving us any added value, it’s just income for the lender as their reward to lend us the money to buy the property.

During 2008 to early 2009, we can see the interest rate across the globe is dropping down due to global financial crisis. And also now we know that on December 2008, the official US interest rate is virtually zero. (While the interest rate like in Australia or UK are still heading down). But, the real problem is how do we know that it’s going to go up or go down next month ? Read more