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COVID-19 Mortgage Repayment Holiday. Good, bad or otherwise?

With mortgages most often being people's largest household expense, a mortgage repayment holiday sounds great doesn't it? Not needing to pay your mortgage for an extended period of time. Dreams do come true, even during a pandemic. Or do they...? As with many things in life, when things sound too good to be true, most often they are. There are definitely pros and cons with mortgage repayment holidays so let's have a look at them and some other options you could consider if times are a bit tough ...

Mortgage Repayment Holidays & Interest Only periods due to Covid-19

So we find ourselves in an interesting time where businesses are shut, most of us are trying to work from home, and we're uniting together as a community to stop the spread of Covid-19 and protect those most vulnerable throughout New Zealand. This Level 4 situation where only essential services can be operating means a lot of financial pressure on businesses, individuals and the economy in general. Thankfully we have a government in New Zealand who are aware of this and are doing everything...

We have 10% deposit. Should we wait till we get 20%?

We talk to people all the time who have done a great job of keeping their student loans low, their existing debt minimal and have a good steady income who are looking o buy a house. They’ve also been contributing to their KiwiSaver and saving often as well for their deposit. They come to us and they have somewhere from 10 - 15% deposit needed to buy a house they are looking at. Great. Banks are able to lend for the purchase of a house when you have a 10% deposit so we can do something for you....

Aren't brokers just.....? Myths about Mortgage Brokers

There are a lot of myths out there about what Mortgage Brokers do and don't do, how we make our money and how relevant we are.While we're on lockdown I thought it would be a great time to dispel a few of these myths, explain a bit more about what we do and how our business operates....

Saving & Planning for your first home

We all know that your home is one of the biggest purchases you'll make in your life. We want to make the path to you owning your own home as easy as possible, so we've put together some handy tips which we know work, to get you into a position to make it happen faster!...

Is now a good time to upsize your family property?

Here at My Mortgage we are often asked for our opinion about a certain property purchase and the pros and cons of it. We like to stay objective on these sort of things but we do have opinions and if pushed, we'll happily share them in terms of what we would do if we were in the same situation.  Upsizing your family home may need to be done for a variety of reasons. Things like growing kids take up more space, growing families may require more bedrooms, or just the need for a second bathroom...

Getting bank statements for a home loan application

In this digital age we are trying to make things as simple as possible for you to get us all your application information electronically (a key reason we launched Online Mortgage!). The banks require quite a lot of documentation nowadays and one of the main things we find complex for clients is getting their bank statements from their online banking. Most of us don't get paper statements anymore (#savethetrees) and so we rely on being able to log into our internet banking and get these stat...

Types of loans

We get asked a lot about the different types of loans you can take, and there is often a lot of confusion about how these can and should be set up. The golden rule is that it's important to get the structure that's right for you - your family situation, income, and future plans. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here but it's useful to understand what different types of loans there are and how they work....

Buying your first rental - An Accountant's Take

A "non-boring" Accountants view (maybe I have stretched the truth a little there) from Ivan Martinovich of Our Accountants So you are thinking that life is going good and the only thing that make it complete is buying a rental property or two that someone else can help pay off the debt (plus the added bonus of being able to spend some quality time with your favourite Mortgage Broker and Accountant) – sounds like you are on the road to living the dream!! Before you go ahead and sign up for the ...

Interest Only Pressure

I was bopping along to some Flight of the Conchords whilst emailing some clients the other day and a very appropriate song came on.  "Inner city pressure" (here is the link if you want to reminisce some great kiwi music of a decade ago)  It got me thinking about the "Interest Only Pressure" that a lot of people are facing from the banks at the moment and what we can do to put more options in the hands of those borrowing and not just being dictated what can be done by the current c...

Meet the My Mortgage team

There's more to My Mortgage than what you see on the surface... For us to continue to deliver great service to our clients it's important that we've got an awesome support team doing the work behind the scenes. In the early days it was just Adam with a computer and cellphone looking after all clients and working the banks to get the best deals.Now you'll find Amber, Renee, Flo and Steph in the office ensuring that your best foot is being put forward with the bank and that we're making the loan a...

Afterpay etc & how it may affect your ability to get a mortgage

Buy now, pay later schemes have been around for a long time and were generally termed as Hire Purchases. Traditional credit cards are also essentially a Buy Now, Pay Later type thing as well. However, in recent years a new bit of financial technology has emerged that is taking the world of retail, especially online shopping, by storm. Systems that allow you to pay off your purchase with staged payments over a specific number of weeks, with no added interest to the purchaser, have started to...

Your Home Loan Elevator Pitch - Telling your story

Are you not having any love with your bank?  Or you feel like you're just not getting what you want? We don't consider ourselves to be greasy salespeople by any stretch but most people can appreciate the importance of getting your home loan "pitch" right.  It's a bit like a job interview. To start off with you've got to understand what the other side wants. This is a hard one with the banks as their policy is changing all the time and often their policies are not published anywhere so ...

So you've split up... what do you do?

If you're going through a relationship break-up, it's not an easy time in your life but with the right people around you and the right advice, you can come out the other side in a better place. In this blog we want to cover off the key people, options and processes to help make the financial side of things as simple as possible - and of course leave you in a positive position at the end of the day....

Is your Home Loan still floating? We need to talk!

If you've got a home loan which is sitting on floating and you've been getting around to fixing it... or perhaps a fixed loan expired and has just rolled on to floating then this message is really important.  The difference between the floating rate ~5.30% at the moment and short term fixed rates ~3.59% is almost 2%.  It's huge!...

Our thoughts on if to fix or float - Fix for a year

At the risk of oversimplifying things... I believe the best thing you can be doing right now is to fix your home loan for 12 months. ANZ came out last week saying they saw another at least two or maybe even three drops in the OCR down to as low as .25%.  What this means is that the interest rates the banks offer could drop further in the next 12 months. The 12 month is already the cheapest rate available (as I write this we're getting deals around 3.5% with most main banks).  So l...

Getting creative - Funding your rental portfolio

The banks are getting tougher and tougher with lending criteria, especially with investors who seem to have been unfairly tagged as a bit of a problem in the lending space. If you're struggling to fund your next purchase or improvements then these five tips could help make the difference between a deal happening or not....

Welcome Home Loan & Homestart grant changes

Earlier this week the Government announced that they had been "overly ambitious" with their goal to build 100 000 homes in the next 10 years so have reset KiwiBuild. As a part of the reset, it has launched a new "progressive ownership" initiative freeing up $400 million from the KiwiBuild projects. However, the main benefit for first home buyers is the change to the First Home Loan (previously Welcome Home Loan) and First Home Grant (previously Homestart grant). The main change is the halving of...

Your Airbnb Mortgage - Is this an option?

The rental market has changed dramatically over the 12 years that I've been a Mortgage Broker and as ever, there are a bunch of resourceful people out there finding the best ways to provide a good home and get a good return for their property investment. When I started out, renting weekly was the only way that you'd generally receive income from your rental property.  But now we're seeing lots of changes and the main ones are people moving to Airbnb or Renting by the room to maximise their ...

The financial life cycle & how it works

As you can imagine, we get the pleasure of helping people all across the financial spectrum... From people with no deposit and a dream of owning a home, right through to those with 20 or 30 rental properties and untold millions in wealth. The thing that always gets me is that every one of these people have a story and in most cases they've either been through the below process or they're starting out on their journey from one to the next. I think this is best explained by these five simple stage...

Renting by the room - What are the ins and outs?

The rental market has changed dramatically over the last decade and as ever, there are a bunch of resourceful people out there finding the best ways to provide a good home and get a good return for their property investment. When we started out, renting weekly was the only way that you'd generally receive income from your rental property.  But now we're seeing lots of changes and the main ones are people moving to Airbnb or Renting by the room to maximise their return.  But there are s...

Why borrowing power is less when you don't have 20%?

We love working with first home buyers. The excitement of walking through your own front door for the first time is something that never gets old.  After more than 15 years combined experience between us, there is one thing that keeps coming up over and over - why can’t I borrow as much if I have less than 20% deposit? While there are much publicised rules around how much banks can lend to people with less than 20% deposit, there are also lesser known requirements around income, current d...

"Creative" funding of Rental Properties

One of the things we're constantly asked by investors, is "how can I get around the LVR rules"? The reality is that there is no silver bullet, but there are some ways in which you can be clever about how you approach your next rental purchase and really it depends where you sit in terms of equity, income and what you're prepared to pay to borrow money....

How to be the best guy jumping out of a plane

If you’re going to do a skydive, you want the gear getting you from the plane to the ground to be 100% perfect, right? We’d call that managing your risk, and it’s what the banks do when they assess your home loan application. You want to be down on the ground, unhurt with a success rate of 100%, the same as the bank wants you to pay back the money they’ve leant you to purchase your home. Understanding risk is a good way to think about the differences between a 10% and a 20% deposit. If y...

Foodtogether Cambridge - My Mortgage Community Project

Food{together} Cambridge is a non profit social enterprise made up of people right here in Cambridge that has the goal of making seasonal fresh fruit and vegetables accessible to everyone in our community at affordable prices, typically between two thirds to a half of what you would pay elsewhere. Claire and My Mortgage became involved in 2018 to help build Food{together}'s reach in our community and make recipes available for the fantastic fruit and veggies that Food{together} provide...