What’s your savings account and why do you use one if you have an offset?
If you have funds going into an account other than your offset it makes sense for them to be paying your mortgage so the offset stays as high as possible. Even better, get everything paid into your offset and then pay mortgage and everything else from there.
Ah ok. I am first home buyer so had to idea we can do this. I’ll close all my accounts today and just use offset for everything.
Some banks don’t allow yountondo everything from an offset so might not want to close the others yet. But the Odra is to keep as much as possible in there. It basically free tax efficient money by doing so.
My bank allows me to choose as many accounts as I want to become offset accounts so check if that’s available as an option for you. That way it’ll make no difference.
We throw a bit over our mortgage every month into our offset. The offset account is nearly 40k, and it counts towards ‘paid off’ for interest purposes. It’s worth doing as it can grow your offset, and reduce your payments. Think of it as extra payments you can ‘claim back’ if need be.
Pay your mortgage fortnightly not monthly.
Paying monthly vs fortnightly
As an example, imagine you take out a $400,000 loan for 30 years at an interest rate of 3.64%. Your monthly payments will be $1,827.58. Over the duration of the loan, the total amount you repay will be $657,931 including both principal and interest.
If you switch from monthly to fortnightly repayments, you’ll be paying an extra $1,827.58 each year. This will cut the time it takes to repay your loan by four years and ten months. You’ll also save $38,145 on interest charges.
No real benefit, just changes the account you need to ensure has enough funds available. I had a similar setup previously, just used the redraw as the savings since you get a better interest rate.
I don’t know about other banks, but the CBA now lets you nominate multiple accounts as offsets, plus having a mortgage redraw account. That way, it doesn’t matter where your money is kept, it all counts towards reducing your interest. Makes a difference.
