Home Loans

If you're in the market for a home loan, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the huge number of mortgage products available. It may help to start out by speaking to your financial broker to help determine the kind of loan that best suits your financial situation.

When you're committing hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of your life to a home loan, you need to be aware of mortgage mistakes to avoid.

1. Think twice before drowning in fees.
Some mortgage lenders charge an unusually high number of fees including application fees, valuation fees, set-up fees, top-up fees, redraw fees, transfer fees, exit fees the list goes on.

Owning your own home is the great Australian dream. When you're manically cleaning the lounge room in time for your next rent inspection, having to put up with your landlord's love of lime green carpet and generally stuck in a rent rut, it can seem like just that: a dream.

If everyone except you seems be climbing the property ladder, maybe it's time for you to wake up and live the dream. Find out how easy it actually is to move towards buying your own home and say "adios" to your landlord forever.

Feel like you don't have any money? Think about how much you pay for rent every month and you'll soon realise that this amount could be going towards your mortgage repayments, instead of making your landlord richer.

If you worry about interest rates rising, but don't want to be stuck in a fixed interest loan, a split loan may be the ideal solution for you. Also known as a combination loan, a split home loan marries the flexibility of a variable rate loan with the stability of a fixed rate loan.

By choosing a split home loan, you can customise the loan and take advantage of the various features that different loans have to offer. The features available with this type of loan make it particularly attractive for first time borrowers.

Most borrowers choose to split their loan equally, having 50% fixed and 50% variable, but the loan can be split in other ways, such as 40% fixed and 60% variable.

Split loans are especially popular in times of economic uncertainty, for example, when interest rates are rising. By splitting a loan, borrowers can be protected against the risk of higher rates by having part of their loan at the lower fixed rate.

Borrowers with split loans generally have the option to choose a different repayment method for each part of the split. How does this work? Well, if interest rates go up, you are safe in the knowledge that the fixed part of your loan is safe from movement. On the other hand, if interest rates don't change, or even go down, then you can make the most of the variable portion of your loan and pay off that part faster.