How to protect your equity against falling property market
Money
With interest rates rising and property values falling, Queenslanders may be considering how they can build equity in their own homes.
Equity is the difference between the current market value of your property and the amount remaining on your home loan.
As you pay off your home loan or if the property’s value increases, your equity goes up.
However, if the market value of your property decreases, you could find yourself with less equity or possibly negative equity.
How to build equity in your home
There are several ways you can build equity in your home:
- You could increase the value of your property by renovating or making improvements to your home.
- Reduce your loan balance by making more regular or larger repayments. Instead of paying monthly, change your regular repayments to fortnightly or weekly. Alternatively, rather than treating yourself when you get a work bonus or refund, put this money to work by depositing it into your home loan. Make sure you check if there are any restrictions set out by your loan on how much extra you can repay or if you can access the funds.
- Open an offset account if your loan account has this option – any money you put in this account is deducted from your loan balance, meaning you are only charged interest on the difference. For example, if your mortgage is $450,000 and you have an offset of $50,000, you will only pay interest on $400,000 of your loan balance.
Reasons to unlock your equity
Once you have built up enough equity in your home you may want to access it. You can generally only borrow up to 80% of the property’s value before Lender’s Mortgage Insurance (LMI) becomes payable.
Rather than saving up a deposit, you may want to use the equity in your existing home to buy an investment property.
You could also access your equity to renovate or extend your current home or use it for other purposes like buying a car or diversifying your wealth portfolio by investing in other assets.
Speak to one of our Lending Specialists to better understand your options.
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