Property prices – are they in free fall?

Is the Auckland Property market crashing?

In this month’s video update we tell you:

• What’s going on in the market right now and why
• How you can benefit as a buyer
• How to sell successfully in this very challenging market

Are interest rates really dropping?

Watch our latest interest rate video for:

• What’s happening with interest rates?
• Best borrowing strategies

Don’t wait! Audit your debt expenses and save thousands

Times are tough and we’re all looking at ways to tighten our belts.

The best approach? Don’t worry about the little things. Start with the biggest rocks and work backwards. The number of times I’ve heard my friends tell me they’re going to save money by cutting their coffee consumption! If they just restructured their debt instead, they could have free coffee for the next few years.

The lowest hanging fruit is always what’s in front of us. Let’s get started!

Mortgage debt

Repayments on your property loans are probably your biggest monthly costs. Are they set up efficiently? (Email us a summary of your loans and we’ll let you know how much you could save.)

• Do you have loans on floating rates that should be fixed?
• Could you refinance your loans to with lower interest rates?
• Can you reschedule your loan repayments to save interest? For example, you could pay fortnightly instead of monthly.
• Have current higher interest rates made your debt repayments hard to manage? We could negotiate an extended payment schedule or even capitalise your interest to reduce the impact on your finances.

All your other loans

Do you have car loans, hire purchase or personal loans? Check the interest rates on this short term debt. It could be a long-term problem.

• How much do you spend on interest on these other loans?
• Can you consolidate them into a single lower-interest loan? You can simplify your repayments and save a lot on interest.

Credit Cards

• Are you paying off your credit card each month and paying no interest? Or are you using it for longer-term finance? Some credit cards have much lower rates than others – shop around.
• Has your debt become hard core? You could you switch it to a bank loan secured by your home. It would give you a lower interest rate and fixed repayments.
• Is your credit card working against you? Should you just leave it at home?
• Subscriptions hide in your credit card statements, and they can add up to serious money. Go through a recent statement and ask yourself if you really need all of those services.

Overdrafts

Overdrafts can be an expensive line of credit. If you have any, take a close look at them.

• Do you need it? This is a facility you pay for. If you haven’t used it for a while consider cancelling it.
• Check your business overdraft rate immediately. Current rates for small businesses are 15 to 20%. Armed with this information you will think differently about how you use your overdraft.
• Actively manage your overdrafts. Personal overdrafts should be a safety net and business overdrafts should be a leverage tool to make more money. A lot of people are lazy with their management of these tools and end up paying a lot of additional interest through not actively moving money and not being aware of what they are actually paying in costs.
• If you definitely need the funding, consider rescheduling your debt into a loan and cancelling the overdraft.
• Another cheaper way to keep the same funding facility is to replace your overdraft with a flexi-credit home loan. Instead of paying overdraft rates of 14-19% you pay the home loan rate of about 8.6%. (We normally get our clients a 0.6% discount.) On a $100k business overdraft you could save $10,000 every year. Remember, if you do this you have to be disciplined to transfer the money back or set up an automated ap to repay the money.

Want to make it easy? Get our Cost Savings Cheat Sheet!

We have a cheat sheet that gives you a check list for all of these steps. Reply to this email and tell us you’d like a copy.

Remember, we’re happy to help you find big cost savings on your home loans. We can renegotiate them, restructure them and turn them inside out if we have to so that you make big savings each month.