Today MyRate reviews some tips about saving money in the domain of entertainment.

I was very shocked last saturday when I went to the movies and was charged close to $19 for one ticket. Five years ago, I was used to pay $15!But everything changes, nothing remains the same: wages go up, prices go up, rent goes up, house prices go up, I suppose movie tickets go up too.

If you were to take your average family of 2 adults & 2 children to see the latest 3D movie, it would cost you close to $80 and that doesn’t even include pop corn or drinks!

To “save” money, you might think subscribing to Pay tv is the solution. With packages averaging $100 per month, you can watch as many movies as you want from the comfort of your home.

This is true but this is still $100 gone every month and more time spent vegetating in front of your television.

I think a good compromise would be to go to the movies every 2 or 3 months or you could go every month while taking advantage of the “cheap Tuesdays” sessions which are 40% cheaper than normal.

This way you still allow yourself and your family to be entertained without blowing your budget.

The money not spent can go towards saving a deposit or go towards paying your home loan faster!

Calculate how much you would save if you cut back on your unnecessary expenses such as movies tickets or pay TV subscriptions, and put the money towards your home loan.

The last few years has seen intense competition in the home loan market. As home loan activity slowed, many lenders were forced to offer very aggressive deals just to keep customers coming through the doors.
We saw this kind of aggressive pricing coming mainly from the big banks.

If you think about their operating model, it is easy to understand why they had no choice. The banks are very traditional businesses. They have huge operating overheads – including massive retails rents, broker commissions, excessive executive salaries,  football stadium naming rights, mobile lenders, wide reaching media campaigns, etc. In addition to all this overhead, they also run very traditional, paper based, inefficient business process. This means that there is a lot of manpower employed to keep things running. When the environment for growth slows, these inefficient, slow, ineffective business processes must still have volume passing through them or they start to fall apart and cannot simply be ramped up again when the need arises.

If they let back-office staff go due to an economic slowdown, then when things turn around, they have to rebuild a lot of that process. To rebuild takes a lot of time and big banks cannot afford to fall behind in terms of processing capacity. So, faced with the prospect of earning lower margins for a ytear or two, or rebuilding some business processes, they typically choose to earn lower margins.

As such, we saw them offering bigger discounts to their advertised rates than we have seen in recent times. The logic being that they need the same amount of volume coming through but from a smaller pool of opportunities… which means they needed to win more market share in order to meet volume requirements. With lenders such as MyRate always offering competitive rates, the only way they could achieve this was to discount their pricing to very aggressive levels.

In many instances, they offered intro rate periods or honeymoon periods that were very enticing, but that are now reverting back to their more regular pricing levels. Which brings us to this post – what to do if you find yourself on the expiring end of one of these deals?

The answer, according to us, is pretty much  the same message that we always push – shop around. Review other offers. Every time you check your home loan to ensure it is competitive you are doing yourself a favour. The end of special pricing periods is simply another opportunity to do a home loan health check.

One of our sales consultants can help you and conduct a MyRate review of your current situation to see if we can help you save. You should also search the internet to see what other offers are out there. Might be that the price difference is not huge, in which case you may choose to stay where you are. But if there is a big difference in rates and fees, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour or two looking for a better deal.

MyRate would like to wish everyone “Xin Nian Kuai Le”, a very happy Chinese New Year and welcome the Year of the Dragon in 2012!

The dragon represents prosperity, good luck and good fortune.

According to http://chinesenewyear2012.net, “dragon years are lucky for anyone thinking of starting a business or initiating a new project of any sort because money is easier to come by for everyone, whether it’s earned, borrowed or received as a gift”.

So what does it mean for the home loan market?

We can hope that interest rates are going to remain relatively low and it may be time for you to start that new project you were thinking about, that is, buying a new home!

To put the odds on your side, My Rate recommends doing lots of research before taking the plunge of getting a home loan: educate yourself by going online on government websites, comparison websites or lenders websites.

That way you will be able to learn about the different types of home loans for instance fixed, variable, or line of credit as well as features such as offset accounts or the ability to make extra repayments.

MyRate reviews our education centre on a regular basis. This is full of information about the home loan process, valuations, lenders mortgage insurance and tips on what to look for in a good conveyancer.

Don’t wait any longer and start gathering information at MyRate Education Centre.

Taking a break from all the finance posts, we thought we’d share our thoughts about the online experience in general.

So if you’re reading this blog, you are most likely a savvy online consumer. This means that you probably turn to the Internet first whenever you are faced with any challenge. This could be for anything from buying travel tickets, to figuring out what’s wrong with your tumble dryer, to finding a new home loan. The internet is simply brilliant at giving us all the information we need the moment we need it.

All the products and services we need are becoming increasingly more widely available online too. We can pretty much take care of arranging most things from the convenience of our lounge chair. But not all online businesses are equal – and it is when faced with one that is a bit behind the game, that we realise how brilliant the industry leaders are.
This struck me recently when doing a whole lot of online shopping buying school supplies for the new year. I bought everything I needed - school shoes, stationery, lunch boxes, and even the first week’s lunch box fillers! In dealing with the various online stores, it became apparent  exactly who the market leaders are – there are many stores that all sell the same thing but there are those that excel by simply offering a more intelligent process – something that shows that they really understand their customer and why their customer is shopping online. This as opposed to those bricks-and-mortar stores that simply threw up a website almost as an afterthought just to “compete” with other online players.

One simple “feature” (not sure you can even call it that) that’s an indicator of those that really understand “online”, is the simple “leave item at door if unattended” tick box. Yes, this simple option changes everything. It shows that the merchant understands that we don’t get everything delivered to the office which is manned during business hours. It shows that they also understand that no normal human being can afford to sit at home all day waiting for the delivery guy to show up. It shows recognition of the fact that we are prepared to risk that no one will steal our $7.49 plastic lunch box from our doorstep if the delivery guy was to leave it there. It makes a huge difference in “achieving” the convenience of online.
I recently witnessed the failure of a less convenient process which really drove this message home. From the upstairs window at my house I noticed the white “contractor” Australia POST delivery van pull up outside. I walked downstairs to go greet the man who would be bringing me the item that was being delivered. I opened the door and instead of finding a human being standing there – all that was left was that horrible, terrible note that we all hate - “we tried to deliver your item but no one was home. Please come and collect it from the Post office but not for at least another 4 hours”.

Now, it only took me 30 seconds to get to the front door and yet I still missed him. The infuriating part was that this guy did not even attempt to see if we were home. No door knock. No door bell ring. No acknowledgement of the driveway full of cars. Nothing. It was as if the item he was delivering was the note and not the actual package. A definite breakdown in the “convenience of the online experience”. Instead of me receiving my item with no fuss, I now had to arrange to go collect it from a store with inconvenient opening hours, inconvenient parking, and which is further away than another store that sells the same item. Just a ridiculous situation. One that could easily have been avoided with the addition of a “leave package at front door if address unattended” tick box. Really really frustrating.

MyRate reviews customer feedback daily. We are always looking to improve the user experience. We work to constantly improve our website and to add new tools and features based on the comments we get from our users. Sometimes we are unfortunately limited by legislation, and compliance requirements in terms of how streamlined and easy we can make the application process – but we think we do a pretty good job.

If you disagree, or if you have any great suggestions to help us improve, please let us know.Just send us an email to review@myrate.com.au, we would love to hear from you.

A famous Hong Kong bank recently launched a new marketing campaign linking bank and exercise telling us that we should look after our bank account the same way we look after our body in other words to not be lazy!

This leads MyRate to review gym memberships costs & us writing about choosing the right fitness option, assess the savings that can be made in that field & the repercussions it can have on your home loan!

Nowadays there are so many options in regards to improving your fitness: you can join a gym, a boot camp training, have a personal trainer or even join a netball or soccer team.

In Gym clubs alone, there are so many different choices: a women only gym, a premium gym, a gym opened 24 hours a day... It is a jungle out there!

Sometimes it can also feel like the gym chain is only there to take your money. A lot of gyms want members to commit for a minimum period. They use forceful sales techniques to sign you up & to try to keep you on, when you decide that you don’t want to go anymore.

A gym membership can range from $14 to $30 per week on average and a bootcamp training can cost anything between $30 to $50 a week.

You may think it is cheaper to join a gym however it is important to realise that most people give up going to the gym 3 months after joining, according to Alan Marlatt, director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington.

Based on an average $75 monthly gym membership, if you committed to a 12 months membership but only went for 3 months, you would be wasting $525.

If you put this $525 as an extra repayment towards a $350,000 loan over 25 years at 6.35% rate, you would save $2,005 in interest.

Review MyRate lump sum repayment calculator now to see how much you could save.