Earlier this year I had one of my loans roll over ( my mortgage is in 3 parts) and annoyingly, since interest rates had gone up since 2016, I wound up paying something like $20 a fortnight more. (Ish? I'm too lazy to go check.)
Such is life in NZ where we don't have fixed rates for 30 years.
I refixed that loan for another year, and figured I'd look at a full refinance the same time next year when everything would come up for renewal.
But last month I refinanced it all to a new bank.
Why? So so much has been happening moneywise: a bit of which I actually can't write about, the rest which I will get around to soon.
The main takeaway is, I'll now be saving nearly $90 a fortnight, which is nothing to sniff at!
Between rates falling a bit in the past few months and the new bank offering a sharp deal, I start saving money right away. I got $3k cashback, which covered the break fees (just under $1000) and also the cash clawback.
The what?! Well, when I took out this mortgage back in 2016 they gave me $1200 in cash. Annoyingly, there was no paperwork outlining the conditions of this (I only have an email confirming the amount, nothing about the payback period). I would have assumed the clawback was proportional over time (as it is with the new bank - I made sure to get this down in an email this time), but no, they required the full cashback amount be paid back in full if I left early.
I'm slightly out of pocket right now due to the lawyer fees for the refinance process, but the fortnightly savings will quickly make up for that.
I've also now been able to set up the floating part of the mortgage as offset, so the positive balances in my accounts will reduce the amount of interest charged on that part of the mortgage. It's not a huge amount right now (a few grand offsetting $25k). But early next year I expect to have a much larger lump sum come in (a topic for another future post) and sit around for a little while - and that will be handy.
