House finance experiences

brought to you by Loan Market

We’ve been in our mid-century home for about three months now. How time flies when you’re having fun! However, the process of buying a house and moving is not something you can call fun...

It’s a pretty stressful time and it’s not something we’d want to be doing again in a big hurry. From the get-go, we were worried about the house contract and whether our offer would be accepted, building and pest inspections and of course obtaining the much-needed finance to buy the house of our dreams.

exterior shot of our mid-century home at night...

All I can say is thank goodness for mortgage brokers. We have always used a mortgage broker to help us find a competitive loan to buy our houses.

Loan Market is just one of the many mortgage brokers out there in the marketplace. With a mortgage broker, the running around is done for you, if you know what I mean…and it’s a free service. Funnily, it is one of the few free things available to you when you buy a house. Ironic, really, as it will give you the biggest debt of your life. Ha!

Our very first home loan was with a non-bank lender which was suggested by our mortgage broker - mostly because it was the late 1990s and we were too much of a risk to traditional banks given our very meagre incomes.  The mortgage broker handled all the paper work and outlined the best loan options available to suit our particular situation.

Never in a million years would we have even thought to go down that non-bank lender route  The loan also fulfilled our criteria of having no monthly account keeping fee, allowing extra repayments, good interest rate (at the time!) and have it split into fixed and variable portions. It was a very good loan and suited us perfectly.

Most importantly, we were able to purchase our first house and get our big toe in the door of the property market.

When we bought our mid-century house in March this year, we used our mortgage broker again to refinance our loan.  It really was one less stress on our time, knowing our finances were in good hands.

I think it is worth giving a mortgage broker a call if you are in the market to buy a property or even if you are thinking of refinancing. Most brokers will visit you at home and you can organise after-hours appointments which is great if you work full-time or have small children.

Anyway, I’m very glad to have that process of buying a house behind us. Nesting and renovating is way more fun.