Make sure the benefits > costs
Like any big financial decision, it’s a matter of weighing up the benefits against the costs and taking your own circumstances into account.
Some of the things you’ll need to consider:
- Your current interest rate and repayments
- If you’re paying any monthly fees
- If your loan type, fixed or variable, works for you
- If your repayment type – principal and interest or interest only, meets your requirements
- Any other loan features that are important to you
- Whether your current lender will charge you for leaving them
While each home loan will have its own terms and conditions, there are some common terms and refinance costs to get familiar with when shopping around.
Our top tip is to compare comparison rates, as this is the true cost of the loan. The comparison rate combines the interest rate on your loan, plus the fees and charges you can expect to pay across the lifetime of your loan. This single number can be compared to other lenders to work out how much the loan will really cost you.
We keep things simple at UBank. That’s why the comparison rate on our variable home loans is exactly the same as our interest rate. Our fixed rate loans do have a different comparison rate, but this just reflects the one-off fee that applies to fix your rate.
Pro tip: To see how much you could save with a lower rate, check out our handy comparison calculators.
Because we’re committed to simple, you could breathe easier knowing we don’t charge any application, monthly or annual fees on our home loans. In fact, the only fee we charge is the rate lock fee on our fixed rate UHomeLoans we mentioned.