Newcastle Living Magazine

Repricing vs Refinancing

Could you save money in a rising rate environment?

Since May 2022, The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has announced several interest rate hike from it’s record low of 0.1%. With these rate increases, we have seen interest rates for home loans increase across the board for both fixed and variable rates.

People with a variable-rate loan will already have felt the hit to their hip pocket, but there are options available to them to help save money. For a start, there is the option to negotiate with the current lender to see if it can offer a lower interest rate, and if it can’t, comparing with others to see if it is worth the switch.

How much could you save with a lower interest rate?

From May until October, homeowners on variable-rate loans could have seen interest rate hikes of around 2.5 percentage points, depending on their loan. What does this look like in repayments? If you had a $500,000 loan with monthly principal and interest repayments over a 30-year term and your interest rate increased from 3% p.a. to 5.5% p.a., your repayments would have increased from $2,108 to $2,839 – an increase of $731. If that loan was $1 million, repayments would have increased from $4,216 to $5,678 – an increase of $1,462.

So what difference can negotiating a lower interest rate make to your repayments?

Decreasing interest rates from 5.5% p.a. to 5.25% p.a. would reduce monthly repayments by:

• $500,000 loan: $78
• $1 million loan: $156

Decreasing interest rates from 5.5% p.a. to 5% p.a. would reduce monthly repayments by:

• $500,000 loan: $155
• $1 million loan: $310

When we look to get you onto a better rate, there are a number of ways we can go about it. First, we can look to negotiate with your current lender. Alternatively we can look at the broader market at over 60 lenders to see if you could be better served elsewhere. This is repricing or refinancing.