ASB Options for financial assistance
If your income has been impacted directly by COVID-19, ASB are offering the following options for you:
- Interest only repayments on home loans for up to 6 months
- Mortgage repayment deferral for up to 6 months (interest will still be added to the loan, meaning your loan balance will increase)
- Interest only repayments on home loans for up to 3 months
- Mortgage repayment deferral for up to 3 months (interest will still be added to the loan, meaning your loan balance will increase)
What do those options mean?
Interest Only - This means you only have to pay the interest on the loan over the next up to 6 months so your loan won't increase but it wont be decreasing either. To work out the cost of this, take your total home loan value, and times that by the interest rate (e.g. 4.15% becomes 0.0415) and that will give you the interest you would pay over 12 months (approximately). Divide that by 52 to find out how much your weekly payments would be on an interest only period.
Mortgage Repayment Deferral (previously mortgage repayment holiday) - This means you don’t have to pay anything for the next up to 3 - 6 months, but the interest you would have paid over that time period will be added to the amount of the mortgage. At the end of the deferral term your loan will increase by the amount of interest added and as it is added, interest will be charged on that interest. At the end of the period, your minimum repayments would then also increase.
Will this end up costing me more in the long term?
On all of these options you may pay more interest over the lifetime of your loan as the loan term is longer, you will be paying interest for longer or your loan has got larger due to the repayment deferral.
How can you apply?
If you are interested in any of the options, feel free to reach out to the My Mortgage team and we'd be happy to discuss them with you and, if you are an existing My Mortgage client, we can submit your application on your behalf.
Alternatively, if you're not an existing My Mortgage client, you can go to the ASB website, login to your Fastnet Classic online banking and then complete the form here and one of the ASB team will come back to you within 5 days and get your adjustments put in place.