How do I minimise loan costs?

Reducing your loan costs over the life of your loan will help you own your home sooner.

With that in mind, here are some ways to reduce the costs on your home loan and offset accounts:

Keep your offset balance as high as possible. 

Interest is calculated daily on the difference between your offset balance and your loan balance, so as your offset balance grows, the outstanding loan amount the interest is calculated against reduces, which means less interest charged on your loan.

Make your repayments either weekly or fortnightly. 

If you pay either a quarter or half of your monthly payments each week or fortnight respectively, you’ll actually end up making an extra month’s worth of payments each year. Over time, the cumulative effect of reducing your loan balance and saving interest gains momentum, so a few dollars saved in the first month can become hundreds, and then thousands over the term of your loan.

Use Bendigo Bank or Suncorp ATMs to access funds. 

Using either a Bendigo Bank or a Suncorp ATM to withdraw cash from your offset account means you won’t be charged an ATM withdrawal fee. Visit our ATM locator to find the ATMs nearest to you.

Access your additional repayments via online redraw. 

If you’ve paid extra money off your loan and you want to access those additional funds, use our Phone Banking or Online Banking systems to complete the redraw for free.

Make the most of your transaction rebate and free transactions. 

Your offset account allows you to make some free transactions (e.g. ATM withdrawals from the ATMs mentioned above and Online Banking transactions), which you should use whenever possible. You should limit the use of transactions that incur a cost (e.g. EFTPOS transactions), however we do offer a transactions rebate that will cover some transaction fee costs per month.

Use your credit card to make purchases and pay off the outstanding balance when it’s due. 

Most credit cards offer no transaction fees for EFTPOS purchases, so you can limit transaction costs by using your credit card for day-to-day purchases. To make sure you pay off the outstanding balance on your credit card, you can set up an automatic direct debit from your offset account to pay the card balance off in full when due. This takes advantage of the interest-free period on your credit card and ensures you  keep your offset account balance as high as possible for the longest period of time – saving you interest on your loan account.

Use your offset account when you need to withdraw cash. 

You can take advantage of the free transaction on each account, so you avoid paying fees every time you withdraw cash from your account.