Minimising the interest you’re charged and the bank fees you pay on your home loan or offset account and you’ll have more money to put towards paying off your loan. You could even reduce the term of your loan.
Keep your offset balance as high as possible.
Interest is calculated daily on the difference between your offset balance and your loan balance, so as your offset balance grows, the outstanding loan amount the interest is calculated against reduces, which means less interest charged on your loan.
Make your repayments weekly or fortnightly.
Pay weekly or fortnightly repayments and you’ll actually end up making an extra month’s worth of payments each year. Over time, the cumulative effect of reducing your loan balance and saving interest gains momentum, so a few dollars saved in the first month can become hundreds, and then thousands over the term of your loan.
Access your additional repayments via online redraw.
If you’ve paid extra money off your loan and you want to access those additional funds, use our Phone Banking or Online Banking systems to complete the redraw for free.
Use your credit card to make purchases and pay off the outstanding balance when it’s due.
Most credit cards offer no transaction fees for EFTPOS purchases, so you can limit transaction costs by using your credit card for day-to-day purchases. To make sure you pay off the outstanding balance on your credit card, you can set up an automatic direct debit from your offset account to pay the card balance off in full when due. This takes advantage of the interest-free period on your credit card and ensures you keep your offset account balance as high as possible for the longest period of time – saving you interest on your loan account.
