If you’re a home owner, you may be interested in refinancing your home loan to get a lower interest rate.
So you may be tempted to do a Google search for ‘rates for refinancing home loans’ or ‘best home loan rates Sydney’. But that would be the wrong place to start.
Why? Because not only do mortgage refinance rates differ between lenders, but so do the criteria they apply when choosing what interest rate to offer you. That means the mortgage refinance rates you’ll be offered depend on your personal circumstances.
So to increase your chances of getting lower rates when refinancing your home loan, you should look at your personal financial situation.
You may qualify for lower interest rates if:
- You earn more money than you need to qualify for your home loan. For example, you earn enough to qualify for a home loan of $800,000 but want only $700,000.
- You put down more than a 20% deposit.
- You live well within your means and don’t have unnecessary debts, such as personal loans and buy-now-pay-later debts. Your home loan and car repayments probably won’t count against you if you pay them on time.
- You have a track record of always paying your monthly instalments on time.
- You have an excellent credit score, which means you have a stable income, you have little debt, you make few credit applications and you pay your bills on time.
- You have investments, like a share portfolio, because this shows you’re able to save.
- You have assets that are paid off, like a car, because this shows you’re good with managing your money.
Before you start shopping around for the ‘best home loan rates in Sydney,’ you have to make sure you have the home loan refinance costs covered.
Those costs include the fees you need to pay to leave your current lender, like:
- Discharge fees ($75 to $895) – cost of settling your existing home loan
- Settlement fees ($99 to $995) – cost of settling your existing home loan
- Break fees – the cost of breaking a fixed-rate home loan agreement
They also include the home loan refinance costs you’ll need to pay to join your new lender, like:
- Application fees ($250 to $990) – cost of processing your application
- Valuation fees ($150 to $350) – cost of valuing your property
- Documentation fees ($150 to $600) – cost of drawing up the home loan agreement
- Legal fees and land registration fees ($200 to $440) – cost of deregistering the mortgage with your current lender and reregistering it with your new lender
- Lender’s mortgage insurance – if you are borrowing more than 80%, you may have to pay LMI again, even if you had already paid it with your original loan
If you refinance your home loan with your existing lender, you might not have to pay many of these costs. But if you refinance with a new lender, you could incur most of these costs.
Rather than doing random Google searches for ‘rates for refinancing home loans’, talk to Loan Station. Your borrowing capacity and the interest rates you’ll be charged can differ significantly from lender to lender. We work with a large, diverse panel of lenders, so we can shop around to find you competitive mortgage refinance rates.
