Mortgages

Those of you with a mortgage, what bank are you with and what kind of mortgage do you have? We are currently with National and our whole mortgage is a fixed and is due to expire, so we are now looking at other options as we dont like our bank manager!

We both have personal accounts at KiwiBank and are keen to move our mortgage to them. Thinking about a revolving/flexible loan as we could pay it off a little quicker, but fixed just seems safe. Any comments much appreciated.

We have ours through pacific home loans, which we got through a mortgage broker. I *think* its ANZ that does that. We re fixed just at 7.9% a while back, just before they went way high. Poor you having to fix now!! I would check out a mortgage broker if I was you. Saves you doing all the hard work.

you shouldnt have to go via a broker if you already have a mortgage - call the banks and get mobile lending managers out to see you...all the major banks do it

btw fixing now the rate will be very high - we were about to do the same a few weeks back...we hate our bnz...but staying put for now til rates drop...

I would suggest only going with a revolving type thing if you are very careful with money. I've seen many relations and friends lose equity big time by continuing to borrow because it's so easy.

I would go and see a broker - our broker that got our mortgage said that he will contact us each time our fixed rate expires and give us the best deals, so we are informed. But some are dodgy, so just keep that in mind too

Btw, we are with Westpac and got ours at 8.05+ .15 low equity = 8.2% for 3 years in Jan, just before the massive hike.

We have a fixed mortgage (7.8%) with ASB.. I definitely agree with emz about the revolving type mortgage, it can be a bit of a $$ trap if you're not the strictly disciplined type. I preferred fixed as I like to know exactly how much is coming out..

With the broker thing just check which banks/how many banks they are working with ... some only work with certain banks which they have a good 'relationship' with ... we used a broker for our first mortgage .. the other two we brokered ourselves and got really good deals.

We have most of ours fixed, one on interest only and around 20K on flexi.

Edited by SuziE

We bought our place in October and went fixed with National. We were already with them with we went through a broker and he negotiated a great deal for us.

We are part fixed and part revolving. The only reason we got part revolving is because we are doing renovations and needed to be able to get hold of large chunks of money whenever we needed it. Works well for us!

I work for Bnz (on maternity leave) so a little biased as I know more about their mortages. But they have their tailored homeloan as it helps you pay it off sooner and you can get fly buys with it too. If you fix but want to pay off lump sums you can do 5% of the total amount of the mortage each year with out it effecting your fixed rate (which means if you have a 100,000 mortage you can pay 5,000 off per year to get it down quicker) BNZ do do other ones too and its just a phone call away to find out whats best for you. They don't go thru mortage brokers along with other lending places so mortage brokers aren't always getting you the best deal out there rather whats the best deal for them (what bank pays the mb best)
You can part float part fix if you want the flexiblity but thats best if you want to make bigger lump sums as you can get a seperate loan (mortage) using the same house as security - we have 10000 seperate from our main larger mortage taken out the same time.
hope thats not too confusing for you.
PM me if you wanna know more. I also know abut TSB as I have had one there and not because I work there but the BNZ one was better for us as we were going to pay so much more interest in the long run at tsb.

emz wrote: And always remember, the banks work for you, not the other way around! They want your money, so they'll try and bend over backwards to get it, especially with the interest rates being so high.

Unless you're 25 buying a stand alone bungalow on a cross lease section with 9 units behind!

ONLY BNZ would give us a home loan! Granted that was back in '02 before the market went nuts but even when our fixed expired last year and we looked into remorgaging with another bank we still had issues (even though our house has almost doubled in value!)