If you’ve only taken out your home loan in the last few years, refinancing is probably the last thing on your mind. But having a set-and-forget attitude to your home loan is not ideal! Leaving your home loan unchanged for its entire term could mean you miss out on substantial savings, or opportunities to make your money work harder for you to build wealth for your future. In this article, we look at the top 5 reasons why you might want to consider refinancing your home loan.

1. To pay less on your mortgage repayments
Refinancing can often reduce the amount of your mortgage repayments – and this is probably the number one reason why people consider refinancing. Everyone would like to save money on their home loan repayments – since they usually account for around 30% of our income every month.

If you’ve had your home loan for a while and interest rates have fallen, you could access a better rate and this will reduce the amount you have to pay for each mortgage repayment. Even if interest rates have not fallen since you first took out your loan, you can sometimes access a better rate if your personal financial situation has improved in that time.

Accessing a better rate can not only reduce your home loan repayments, just a slight drop in interest rates could potentially save you thousands of dollars over the life of your loan.

Refinancing could also help you to reduce your mortgage repayments if you extend the life of your home loan. For example: Say you have been paying off your home loan for ten or fifteen years. You could potentially refinance the outstanding amount over a 30 year term, thereby substantially reducing your monthly repayment amount.

2. To extend or remodel your home
If your family is growing and you need a few more bedrooms or a bit of extra space, buying a bigger house is not always the ideal solution. Many people refinance their home loan to access funds to extend and remodel their existing home, rather than go through all the upheaval of moving.

Renovating, remodeling and extending is a great way to get the home you want. What’s more, it can potentially increase your home’s value at the same time. So even though you may be taking out some of the equity you have in your home to do the extensions, the resulting increase in value of the home could potentially increase your equity again and help you to recoup some of the costs.

3. To consolidate debts
We often talk about the difference between types of debt. A home loan is a ‘good’ type of debt because it carries a relatively low interest rate and can be used to build wealth. Other types of debt can be ‘bad’ because very high interest rates can trap you into continually paying interest instead of paying off your debt. These debts are usually things like credit cards – which can often carry an interest rate of 20% pa or more, car loans, store credit and so on.

Refinancing could allow you to access funds to pay off these expensive debts once and for all. By rolling all your debts into your home loan, you will be paying them off at a lower interest rate. You could also save yourself money every month on interest payments, simplify your situation by only having one payment to make, and beat the interest trap of credit cards and other expensive forms of credit.

4. To access the equity for other purposes
The equity you build up in your property is a valuable asset. We mentioned earlier that a mortgage is a ‘good’ form of debt because it can be used to help build wealth for your future. That’s because your equity increases as you pay down your mortgage and property values go up – and this can potentially give you access to funds you would not have had if you did not have a mortgage.

That means your mortgage really can be used to facilitate your lifestyle and build wealth for your future. By refinancing, you could access your equity and use the funds for a deposit on a property investment, to invest in stocks and shares, education costs, to support your children in purchasing their own home or for a wide variety of other reasons.

5. To fix your interest rate or switch to a different mortgage product
Switching to a fixed interest rate loan, (or a different type of loan that offers additional benefits) is another popular reason for refinancing a mortgage.  As time goes by, your needs change and it could be that another mortgage product like a fixed interest rate loan would be more beneficial for you.

The number one benefit of a fixed interest rate mortgage is that your mortgage repayments will remain the same for the length of the fixed term – usually 1, 3 or 5 years. This gives you more peace of mind because it makes it much easier to plan your budget.

Many people think that switching to a fixed interest rate mortgage will save them from future interest rate rises. And whilst this is true to a certain extent, fixed interest rate mortgages are often a bit more expensive to start with than your standard variable rate home loan, so interest rates would probably need to rise considerably before you came out in front.

There are also many other mortgage products on the market that may have more beneficial features than the home loan you have now. For example, redraw facilities or a mortgage offset account. If your current home loan simply doesn’t offer you the flexibility you need, then by all means talk to us about some alternatives.

Talk to us now about your annual home-loan-health-check
About this time every year, we like to encourage you to talk to us about a home-loan-health check.

A frequent home-loan-health-check is necessary to ensure that your current home loan is still the best home loan product available for you. We recommend that you have a chat with us at least once a year to see if the lending environment has changed or refinancing may be beneficial for you in some other way.

If you’d like to organise your home-loan-health-check, just give us a call. We’re here to help you assess your home loan’s performance and ensure that it is still the right mortgage product for your personal financial circumstances and goals now and into the future.