What is Involved When Refinancing Your Mortgage?
With mortgage interest rates at a record low and banks offering more competitive deals by the day, you may find moving your mortgage to another lender can lead to significant savings.
What is Refinancing?
Moving your mortgage to another bank is called ‘refinancing’. It is a relatively simple process but does need to involve a lawyer who is required to change the interested party (your bank) on your property’s title. Only a lawyer can do this and so you must use a lawyer when refinancing your mortgage.
How to Refinance Your Mortgage
You may choose to go through a mortgage broker to help you find the best rate or alternatively you could talk directly with the bank(s) themselves. Once you have an agreement with your new lender, you’ill need to engage a lawyer and provide your new bank with their details so they can send your lawyer the appropriate documents.
Your lawyer will review your new loan documents and arrange a meeting with you to sign them. Don’t worry, you are not required to break the bad news to your current bank, your lawyer will issue them with a notice and your mortgage will move from your old bank across to your new bank on the same day.
The Cost of Refinancing with Home Transfer Centre
Home Transfer Centre’s legal fees for refinancing start from $1050. Additional fees can apply in certain situations, for example where additional titles, trusts, companies, guarantees or unit titles are involved. If you’d like to talk to us about refinancing your mortgage, click here to submit an enquiry and we’ll be in touch.
The Refinancing Process in Summary:
- Shop around for the best interest rates
- Engage us as your lawyer
- Choose your lender, agree on your rates and provide them with our details (your lawyer will guide you from here)
- Your lawyer will review your loan documents and get you to sign it
- Your lawyer will issue a notice to your existing bank
- On an agreed date, your mortgage will transfer from your existing bank across to your new bank
- On the same date, your lawyer will update the interested party on your property’s title
- Your lawyer will notify you and your new bank when the process is complete
Things to consider when looking for a new mortgage lender:
- Break fees. If your existing mortgage(s) has a fixed interest period which has not ended, you will be charged break fees on any period remaining. This fee is paid on the change over (refinance) day.You will need to find out this break fee as it may not be worth changing
- Kick backs. Some banks will offer you a ‘kick back’ in the form of cash for borrowing from them which may help to cover your legal costs and/or any break fees incurred. Our fees for our work are fixed irrespective of what the kick back may be.
