No reduction of the OCR Despite the diversity of opinions of whether to cut or not to cut the Official Cash Rate to 0.25%, the Reserve Bank unexpectedly held interest…
What is the OCR? The OCR is an interest rate set by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand which defines the wholesale price of borrowed money. This directly affects the…
If you have less than 20% deposit, you are referred to (by the banks) as a Low Equity (or Deposit) Borrower. You are required to meet a different set of…
First home buyers can often get tangled up in the pile of new concepts to learn. In this article, we explore the basics of withdrawing your KiwiSaver and meeting the…
So you’re looking to purchase. Could a flatmate help you purchase a more expensive house? Will a bank take that extra income into account? How much interest will flatmate income…
In this day and age, where house prices are rapidly increasing, it is easy to think that home ownership is an impossible dream. Before I became a mortgage adviser I…
Heat pumps are great. They are efficient and quick to work. In fact, Energywise says that a heat pump is the most energy efficient way of using electricity to heat your…
just don’t miss out on it. In order to grow your savings, you need to earn money. And you have to pay tax on that money. So, you might earn…
Order your Credit Report It’s free to order your own Credit Report and is a great insight into what the bank will know about you. See what loans are recorded…
It’s a question we get asked a lot. If we have an extra amount of money in our salary, should we use the money to pay down our mortgage or…
“My income is too high to be able to use KiwiSaver to purchase my first home”, was a comment made in passing to me today. Article written and submitted by…
Apartments are a very tempting purchase, especially for first-home buyers. They tend to be lower cost and therefore much more within reach. But there are a few things to be…
Auctions can be a little bit overwhelming. They’re meant to be. It’s why they result in higher prices for the Vendors. To help ease the stress, here are 6 quick…
One of the simplest ways to grow your deposit is KiwiSaver. Below, we take a quick look at how quickly your deposit could grow and the numbers around this. Robyn…
This month’s case study looks at a client that asked us to investigate breaking their current interest rates in order to restructure their mortgage. The clients – let’s call them…
While the Reserve Bank has tried to make finance more difficult in the past 6 months, they have also tried to encourage mortgage lending on newly constructed properties. In other…
Whenever you’re dealing with complex numbers, it helps to have a few tricks to make quick calculations easy. So here’s an easy way to calculate how long an investment will…
About 5 years ago, 80% of all mortgages were sitting on a floating rate. And with good reason. The interest rates were falling off a cliff. In a couple of…