Empower Blog Fixed Rate

6 Essential Lessons Everyone Should Know Before Their Fixed Loan Expires 

At Empower Wealth we are passionate about providing practical education that helps our community at every step of their financial journey. We want to ensure that no money is left on the table, and one of the biggest money pits we've found is the interest we pay on our mortgages. So in this video, Ben explains six lessons that every borrower sh...

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2016 Mortgage and Lending Outlook

Here are the other parts of the 2016 Outlook: Australian Property Market Outlook: Part 1: Sydney & Regional NSW Part 2: Melbourne & Regional VIC Part 3: Queensland, Australian Capital Territory and South Australia Part 4: Northern Territory, Western Australia and Tasmania Global Economy and Equity Market Outlook Part 1: United States E...

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When Is the Best Time to Refinance Your Loan?

You’ve bought or invested in a home and are making regular mortgage payments. What happens when you want to adjust your repayment plan? Perhaps a step up in your salary has given you additional resources to pay off your balance in less time. Maybe an outside hardship requires you to refinance in order to improve your cash reserves or your loan mi...

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Is Now the Right Time to be Fixing your Loan?

So is now the right time to be fixing your home loan? One thing that I want to talk about today is to try and explain to you how fixed rates works versus how variable rates works. The first part of this story is, variable rates which is obviously the rates that we see changing when the RBA does their cash rate decision is what we set those variab...

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Different Types of Property Loans and Why Interest Rate Is NOT King 

When purchasing a property in Australia, there are a number of mortgage loan options available. Each has its different benefits such as low interest rates or higher borrowing power, as examples some require principal and interest repayment while others offer interest only terms, while others allow for smaller payments. The best loan will depend on ...

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Finance Talk: Time to Fix?

What an interesting 6 – 12 months we have seen in the lending markets, if you can cast your minds back a lot of the talk about 12 months ago was around how much more rates were going to increase and should we fix our mortgages or keep them variable? Now with the rates on a downward cycle again we are faced with the challenge of choosing to fix or...

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SPECIAL – Fixed Rate Mortgage Report

HOW ARE FIXED RATES FUNDED? Refresher from my comment in our May 2009 newsletter on fixed rates: Funding Fixed Mortgages - Lenders tend to outsource funding on money markets, via other banks/lenders – swap rates, through government bonds or via fixed savings deposits of similar duration which they collect from their own retail deposits, lockin...

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To Fix or Not To Fix?

With Australia missing out on a ‘technical’ recession, given the positive March quarter of GDP, most mortgage holders are now focusing their attention on interest rates.  Have we reached the bottom of this cash cycle and if so, should we be looking at locking in a low fixed rate, before rates start moving up? The possible answer to this deb...

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To Fix or Not to Fix – ‘The question on everyone’s mind…..’

Depending on long term funding costs and increased demand for fixed loans, fixed mortgages can actually go up when the cash rate / variable mortgages are going down, as we have seen just recently. Fixed interest rates don’t automatically move in the same fashion as variable mortgage rates do. So in my attempt to make an informed comment on thi...

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