Sunday, May 17, 2009

Refinancing mortgages

With the mortgage wars having resumed, there are some very cheap financing options available. The best we have come across is from Standard Chartered Bank which offers 1 month HIBOR + 0.7. At current HIBOR rates this equates to about 1% pa. By any measure this is very cheap.

We reviewed each of our mortgages and decided to refinance three of them. In each case we were paying around 2.2 - 2.25%. Reducing the interest cost to about 1.0% will, over the lives of the three mortgages, produce some very significant savings - pretty much enough to pay the school fees for one of our children. Happily, two of the three mortgages are with DBS which has agreed to match SCB's terms so we can refinance without having to involve our lawyers.

We decided that the remaining mortgages were not worth refinancing. A couple are at rates that are even cheaper than what is currently on offer. The remainder are either too small or, in one case, have such a short remaining term, that the benefits of refinancing were negligible.

1 comment:

RM_Apply said...

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