Empower Blog Loan Process

How Lenders look at your Property?

>> Play Audio Here   Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when you plan to approach a lender, you will have an idea about how they will look at your potential purchase. Do the lenders think its risky? How are they going to value it? Is it comparative to other similar properties around the area? Why are they charging Lenders Mortgage In...

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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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What to Expect Post Settlement Re: Your Finances

So you have secured the property and settlement has just occurred.  The stress of the last couple of days is sort of behind you as you still try to get your head around the process that just took place and all the parties that made it happen, from the two banks, the two solicitors, the selling agent, the vendor, your buyers agent, your broker and ...

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What Contractors and Self Employed Borrowers Need to Know

Borrowing money as a contractor for self employed person is not as straight forward as borrowing money when you are a PAYG employee.  In fact the levels of lending policy extremes when comparing PAYG and self employed or contractors is great. At one extreme end, PAYG employees can seek to secure a Home loan with some lenders as early as getting...

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Investment Loan Structure

Most Property Investors realise that debt plays a part in operating most investment properties.  Furthermore, those sophisticated investors who learn that ‘sensible’ leverage or borrowings can accelerate their potential investment returns, take an active approach in better understanding finance and finance structuring through working with prof...

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Alternative to the Big Four Banks

Ben Kingsley, CEO and Founder of Empower Wealth on Melbourne Property TV (MPTV) Panel speaking about the alternative to Big Four Banks, getting the best home loan, ways to deal with mortgage brokers and more. More often than not, property buyers would automatically turn to the Big 4 Banks (CBA, Westpac, ANZ and NAB) when they are looking to borrow ...

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Buying Your Next Home

When buying your next property, your thought process will consider many pros and cons. A bigger property may accommodate a growing family or provide more space for your needs. A smaller property can be less maintenance and accommodate a shrinking family as the young ones leave home over time. Maybe location and ease of access become more importa...

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Brokers Top of Class

The latest Core Data ACQUIRE index market research findings has brokers top of the class.  Core Data conducted a mystery shop exercise, surveying home lenders and ranked brokers ahead of banks and credit unions on a range of seven different criteria. On the most important criteria of ‘Understanding – or the ability to understand customers n...

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$13,000 saving on loan set up costs!

At Empower Wealth we believe that making sure you have the right finance structure is paramount to the success you will achieve in your wealth building journey. In this newsletter I would like to share a story of how we were able to save a client $13,000 in loan set up costs, by ensuring that they had their loans structured in a way that was cost e...

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How Do Lenders Assess Loans?

Gone are the days when you can just go down to your local bank branch and get loan approval because of your longstanding relationship with the manager. These days lenders have become quite sophisticated in their method of assessing loans - it’s now all about Risk Assessment. For years, lenders have been compiling data about every one of their ...

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Lazy Borrowings – Are they costing you?

Recently we saw CUA (the largest Credit Union in Australia) reduce their standard variable rate by 0.25% to 6.62%.  It was a marketing boon for them, as major media picked up on the story as part of what we will see as continued big bank bashing, given their recent profit results and also the overall market share they hold currently. The intere...

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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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