News
Reduce Stress, Borrow Less
The fear of missing out makes people do strange things with their finances. When we tell clients to borrow less, we’re met with incredulous looks.
Mature Borrowers
In recent weeks we have had a number of inquiries from borrowers in their 60’s. They had been to one (or more) lender(s) and were told that they were too old to borrow against a property and were left dejected.
Low Rates and Mortgage Stress
Lenders have specials on all the time to attract home loan clients. Guess what, it works. Most people searching for either a new loan or one to refinance their existing loan are drawn like bees to honey when they see the headline rate.
Time To Look For a New Home Loan?
It may surprise you that many Australian borrowers spend time getting their home loan established but don’t always spend the time making sure their loan continues to be the right loan for them. It is as easy as a 30 minute consultation with a Mortgage Broker to ensure you are still in the right home loan for you.
Broker or Bank
As more than 50% of home loans are now placed through brokers, it’s interesting to reflect on the pros and cons of each channel. In previous articles I had already mentioned some of these but they bear repeating here.
Walk Away
Apologies for the article being a day late, I was in Orange for the Easter break enjoying all that fantastic regional city has to offer. More on Orange later. In our business we see all sorts of borrowers. Those that don’t need to borrow, first time borrowers, borrowers that struggle to get the minimum requirements to borrow and those people that should just walk away from borrowing. It’s the final category that I want to discuss in this article.
Reduced Borrowing Capacity
You may have read in the press recently what I have been banging on about since Nick and I started this business. If not, you can read about it here. The article in the smh – which is around 9 months late – states that APRA’s actions have successfully reined in the housing boom. They’re probably right. However that’s at the cost of the borrowing capacity of most bank customers.
We Have an Income Problem
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
It Would Be Wrong Not To
I received credit approval for a loan from a major Australian Bank around six weeks ago. After four attempts at getting the documents right, I finally had to ask my client to change the offending items by hand and submit the documents. At least that way – even if the bank does not accept the changes – they will know how to produce a correct set of documents.
Fantastic Service, No Authority
We’ve all had to endure help desks or the ironically named “customer service officer” when trying to resolve an error, a fault, a bill error or some other issue. Usually, after going through a frustrating automated menu, with the repeated message beginning with the lie “you’re call is important to us…” you’ve eventually reached the limits of authority of the poor jub you’ve just explained your issue to.