Latest News from My Mortgage

Back to Blog

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....

Five simple tips to repay your mortgage faster

Each time a payment comes out for your mortgage repayments, it feels like it is a never ending flow of money from your account and if you're near the start of your mortgage, 30 years seems like a long time.Trying to pay your mortgage off faster has large benefits to the total amount you will end up paying and the equity you will have available in your property should you want to buy another property or make other investments.We have 5 tips to helping pay your mortgage off faster....

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...

How & Why is My Mortgage free?

As Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson announced in their 1992 Grammy-nominated duet, The Best Things In Life Are Free.But in reality, nothing in life is free, right? Well for once you can get something, and something that is awesome, for free. There is absolutely no cost in working with My Mortgage....

The scribble graph - Adam draws this multiple times week

This scribble is going to be familiar for a lot of people reading this... ...

Situation changing? Structure your mortgage to be resilient

At My Mortgage one of the most important things to us is you having the right home loan for your situation. We often stress that when you get your first mortgage, we'll structure it to fit you best, but over the course of a couple of years, there might have been some changes in your family, financial or personal situation....

Springboard to your first home - The Bank of Mum & Dad

So your parents have said "hey, we're keen to help you with your first home purchase". For a lot of first home buyers, this is the case, and there are a heap of ways that your parents (or other family member) can help make your first home a reality....

Loan term pressure from the banks

We've been seeing a lot more clients lately suffering from some "Loan Term Pressure" from their banks.  Essentially their banks have been asking them to repay their lending faster than they'd like to.This can mean you're forced to pay over shorter loan terms with much higher payments than you'd like but often you feel like there is no other option.  The good news is that there is a better way!...

Free design advice for your new build or renovation!

Here at My Mortgage we love working with our clients and those in our networks to create more value for you in your experience with us. Deanna from The Designery Room thinks along the same lines, and as the designer mastermind behind both Adam and Claire's recent new builds, we thought bringing her into the fold was an absolute no-brainer! So we've teamed up with Deanna to provide free consultations to any clients who are renovating or building a new home and obtain finance with My Mortgage.&nbs...

What does that Jargon mean? We know it so you don't have to

As with any industry, ours is full or Acronyms and Jargon, but what do all those things you hear actually mean?   We try to keep it really simple so if you catch us dropping one of the below things in to conversation now you'll know what we're waffling on about!...

Good news for Investors and First Home Buyers

Big news from the Reserve Bank today... There is some easing around deposit restrictions for new lending from 1st January. Investors - Will now have to have a minimum 30% deposit instead of 35% deposit.  (There is an allowance of 5% of loans to be over this threshold) First Home Buyers  - The banks can now have up to 20% of their overall lending to people who have less than 20% deposit....