Fine Tuning Your Mortgage
Many people (like me) take out a mortgage when we buy a house and then forget about it. It’s only when interest rates rise or fall do we consider the impact on our wallets and take another look. 
Recently I decided to consolidate 3 loans I had taken out and I enlisted the help of Rob Projevski, the Founder of Australian Mortgage Options and a regular on the Daily Drive Radio Show.
Rob had some great suggestion including splitting the repayments into Fixed (80%) and Variable (20%) which gives me certainty over payments for three years whilst also giving me the options to pay down more if I can afford it.
Here’s Rob’s Top 3 tips for saving money on your mortgage…
Don’t let the banks profit from your savings. Either pay it off your mortgage or better yet, place all your money into an offset account and reduce the balance of your mortgage you are paying interest on and pay off your mortgage earlier.
- Use the bank’s money. If you have a credit card with a 55 day interest free period, pay all your bills with your credit card and then at the end of the 55 days pay off the credit card in full or alternatively set up an auto sweep where the money comes out of your account and pays our your credit card in full automatically at the end of the 55 days interest free period. That way you will not be charged interest on your credit card and for that 55 days your money was sitting in your offset account working for you.
- Watch out for bank fees and charges – Fees and charges only ever go up over time and your real interest rate, once you take into account monthly fees, account keeping fees, redraw fees etc can be significantly different to the headline rate, therefore, could extend the time required to pay off your mortgage.
- Another tip is if you have any investment debt and owner occupied debt, park all your money into your owner occupied debt to pay that down first and only make minimum repayments on your investment debt. If you have only investment debt it still makes good sense to park all your money into an offset account and reduce the amount of interest paid on your investment debt.
