Empower Blog Home Loan

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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What could go Wrong at Unconditional?

A couple of things that could go wrong once a contract proceeds unconditionally is the finance. The Finance may not have been in place so there might be a couple of special conditions that the bank imposes that the clients weren't aware of at the time. Examples could be, they require you to pay out of Visa cards prior to settlement just to bring ...

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RBA Rate Decision – March 2015

Today the Reserve Bank of Australia decides to keep rates on hold after dropping rates by 25 basis points last month. Now looking at the Board Meeting minutes from last month, it was a bit of a flip of the coin whether they were going to drop rates in February or potentially wait until March. Ultimately, we all know the outcome of that. They d...

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7 Things to Consider when Securing Your New Home/Investment Property Loan

Whether it’s your first time or tenth home or investment purchase, choosing a lender in a competitive market and getting a loan approved by a bank or lender is a laborious task. There are a lot of requirements to satisfy, applications to fill out and paperwork to get it order, so it can seem as if you will never get it all together and you are...

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Mortgage Free at 23

Jack Stevens knows just how short life is. He was only a teenager when his father sadly passed away from cancer at the young and unfair age of just 58. It was a tough time in his life and all the more painful by the fact his father had been working hard to build a large property portfolio - one that would have provided him with a comfortable retire...

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What do the Banks look for when Lending Money?

So you are thinking about actually getting a loan? What is it that the Banks are going to be looking for in terms of being able to lend you money for a mortgage? There's actually 5Cs that allow them to do that. Character, Capacity, Conditions, Collateral and Common Sense. So let's explore all five! The first one is Character. When they are talki...

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7 Ways to Get your Kids on the Property Ladder Sooner

With the question on affordability always on the mind of those looking to get on the property ladder, Ben Kingsley will share with you seven potential ways to help accelerate your kids dream of property ownership. This presentation at the Melbourne Home Buyer and Property Investor Show will look at ways in which family members can help the Gen X...

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Understanding Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI)

Post the Second World War, Australia transformed itself into ‘The Lucky Country’. We opened our doors to large levels of immigration and we had plenty of land, food, water and great weather that made us attractive for many who were fleeing war torn areas of Europe and alike. It was also through this era that we got our second great tag line of ...

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What are the Costs associated with Buying a Property?

We're about to buy a property! It's an exciting time but we also need to understand the numbers behind acquiring that property. So what are there? Let's use a basically a back-of-the-envelope calculation to help us understand what it's going to cost to buy that property and what sort of loan that we might have to take on that. So let's get our pe...

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How much Money can you borrow?

So how much money can I borrow? It's a question we all ask ourselves from time to time and it's a good question to ask and from a Lender's point of view it's a question around serviceability. So when they're talking about serviceability they're actually saying that here's the household income coming in, here's the expenditure that we've got associa...

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How can Parents help?

I had a fabulous Christmas party with my Mum's side of the family Christmas just gone. Three exciting things happened. Firstly - I'd pulled together a wonderful negotiation on a large floorplan 2BR apartment in St Kilda for a lovely client who was traveling in Vietnam with her friend. Her Dad had agreed to be her Power of Attorney in the event that...

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