St George

Gave up on the idea of U Bank I had a few weeks ago..too inflexible for our situation.

As well as more flexibility, St George appears now to have attractive PPOR and investment offers via their Advantage package ...but I’d also heard all the majors are running weeks behind processing new apps, and most still use quite high floor rates (in the mid 5s) as well as do forensic review of living expenses.

Anyone had recent experience with them?

...Currently with ING for my existing PPOR debt, but they won’t do internal refinances so - notwithstanding they too now offer good rates, online capability, and decent redraw flexibility - am outta there when my existing fixed rates roll off shortly. I want to get back out to 30 year term while still not too old to preserve as much flex as I can!

 

St G is a killer to work with right now, them and Cba probably had the longest turn around times.

Westpac recently providing better under the table rates then St George.

Lower the LVR better the pricing

 

Thanks Tony, good to know. LVR about 50%, so hopefully ok...serviceability always tricky to be sure about when you have a couple of investments on IO (!)

 

If you service with ING then you should be fine with St George

 

Yeah.. I did pre APRA and 2 investments ago..!

...but the main issue with ING is inability to refinance term back out to 30 years as an existing borrower. I am middle aged, so want to do this now in case it gets harder as I get older.

 

A couple of years ago, St G was one of my major bankers. Two of my I/O loans were nearing the end of their term.

I wanted to roll them over for another (third) five-year term. St G said No as they wanted me to go P&I (even though one of the loans offset was fully chocked).

I told St G that I would re-finance the loans as I/O with another bank. They wouldn’t budge.

So I took all of my loans over to another bank.

St G is now not even one of my minor banker. In fact, we have nil business with them.

 

Ahh the insanity of Responsible Lending. Regulators and Lenders coming together to ‘protect’ us from ourselves (!)

 

At that LVR I would be looking at other lenders rather than St George

 

Interesting..who would you be thinking of?

At our current stage, we’re focused on repaying PPOR debt during this current low interest rate period of the cycle, rather than recycling/leveraging back up into additional real estate investments. Cheapness combined with a bit of flex on things like redraw/offset are therefore the criteria.

 

Do you currently have a mortgage broker?

 

Thanks Rolf, I agree there may be options for us beyond the ‘vanilla’ - and some untapped potential.

The balance here is my wife’s risk appetite ..and that our DTI is currently about 7x.

I would actually like to re-lever into some further investments (potentially diversifying away from direct resi property, e.g. LICs and such), but firstly reduce 1-2 turns of DTI through PPOR repayment whilst it’s ‘cheap’.

 

Don't get me started!!!!! I have deals from December that still haven't settled! Straight forward, sub 80% LVR refis........it's ridiculous.

Cheers

Jamie