Budgeting with CBA interest only

While budgets are the flavour of the month, ours is shocking at the moment.

One basic problem - our larger CBA loan is interest-only and paid monthly. And by 'monthly', I mean 'somewhere around the 15th of each month, unless there are weekends or public holidays or we just feel like taking it out early or late'.

Compounded by the CBA mastercard they gave us massively delaying transactions, so we get our bank balance two days before the loan payment is due (which may not be the day it comes out), work out what extra is needed based on whatever it says we need (which isn't always accurate depending on how many days after the 15th they bother to take the loan payment out), transfer enough to cover the difference, and during that 2 days it takes the transfer to go across, the petrol we bought 10 days ago on the mastercard and forgot about comes out and the account goes overdrawn, and this invariably happens several days before a scheduled incoming payment to that account. And we've managed to screw this up several months in a row. All the bills come out of my personal account automatically and I have no issues, the problem CBA account just has rent coming into it fortnightly and my partner occasionally uses it for petrol, preening and food if it looks like the balance is high enough, and we manually top it up to make the loan payments.

We're not ahead on any bills at the moment thanks to being foolish enough to pay a full set of subdivision fees cash, a builder's deposit cash and some other fairly large renovation bills cash about 2ish months ago - round about when I stopped working and went onto the pittance that is Newstart and our income has taken a temporary nosedive - so we have no buffer at all. The only easy solution I can think of in the short term is to change this freakin loan from monthly to fortnightly payments slightly larger than the minimum so we can at least predict when and how much of this money is going to come out and set up an AUTOMATIC transfer, but the bank is absolutely adamant there is no conceivable way we can pay fortnightly. That, or we need to completely stop using the nice fee-free CBA mastercard and go back to using our own high-fee ordinary bank accounts that give us barely 4 transactions a month before charging us a fortune - but that don't delay transactions by stupid lengths of time.

Are they serious that we simply cannot manually put down, say, 55% of our average monthly payments as a fortnightly payment? My previous mortgage I just transferred direct from my own account straight into the loan every fortnight, but that was the ANZ.

There's no point refinancing at the moment to get a buffer despite having easily $200k of equity lying around and actually really needing to get some money out so we stop paying for deposits and other large expenses with cash (we need 60m of fence at the moment and we also need some fairly hefty progress payments to the builder soon), because we STILL don't have a title from the LTO.
 
One basic problem - our larger CBA loan is interest-only and paid monthly. And by 'monthly', I mean 'somewhere around the 15th of each month, unless there are weekends or public holidays or we just feel like taking it out early or late'.

this is why i'm binning CBA - they then have the nerve to turn around and whinge about any oversights.

sorry - for ages during my construction loan, my payments were due on the 22nd. then, for some reason, without notification, they were due on the 16th.

give or take a cupla days around fridays, holidays or weekends....:confused::confused:

i had it all changed back to the 22nd, but in doing so, they said i had now missed a 16th payment, and a new one was due 22nd.

and yes, this is a true story.:(
 
We're just very tight for cash and it drives me bonkers right now when they are screwing with what is a very fine budget as is. Why can't they process transactions on weekends? Its all done by computer after all :mad:

CBA are quite annoying. We get charged $16pm in fees for those loans too, and if I sell either house I'm up for $700 in deferred establishment fees for each.

Our budget is going to be in a far happier place if we can sell either property and/or rent our current one out (we'd either end up debt free or with enough rent coming in to completely cover everything), but that doesn't help us *now* ...
 
Remind me not to get IO again then. Our P&I loan is much easier to budget around (helps that is it is so small lol)

I gotta refinance the offending loan Real Soon Now to get cash to cover fencing/connections/second and subsequent deposits on the new house and I'd guess that P&I or IO is just a box to tick on the refinancing forms. Its $700 odd to refinance/topup and $300 odd to switch loan types without topping up, isn't it?

If this @#$%(&ing title ever deigns to turn up. If we had the title I would have refinanced some weeks ago before I went into not-working sloth mode. We need the house revalued to top up the loan but can't do that while it is still 'officially' un-subdivided. Be nice to actually see the result of all this money we've thrown at this subdivision.

*shakes fist at lands and titles office*
 
Thought I'd impale myself on CBAs hold system for an hour. Last time I did this a few weeks ago, no title. 2 weeks ago I rang the council, no title.

Today? Ages on hold and several transfers but - they have our title! Surveyor or someone didn't tick the box to release it to us (or mention that there was even a box to tick) so the bank is holding it, it'll cost $121 to release it to us.

So today we know that we are $50,000 richer on paper than we were a few weeks ago :D
 
isn't there an automated service at your titles office to get a copy of your title...?

in WA it's $18 and emailed on PDF within 30mins.
 
No, we paid all our fees to SA Water and the surveyor and the council and the government (came to like $10,000+, more considering we had to remove plumbing before we could lodge), got permission from the bank to actually put it through, the surveyor lodged it at the lands and titles office over 2 months ago and ... yeah.

I wasn't after a COPY of the title. I was after the real deal, the actual brand new title in my hot little hands. You can't get a copy of a title that doesn't exist yet, btw, $18 or no. But it exists now :D
 
Bit the bullet and paid the $300 to flick the loan to P&I with fortnightly repayments. For the exact opposite reason for starting this thread: now we have MORE money coming in than we need (or will when they get around to processing the baby bonus forms) and we need somewhere to put it. Only the IP loan has the option of redraw etc and its not a good idea to pay off an IP loan anyway. The IP loan is P&I and fortnightly but the payments are under $100 a fortnight so they barely register on our budget radar.

So we're just going to shovel all our spare money into the loan on this house for a while, fortnightly of course, since we need it for the deposit on the new place and it might as well offset some interest while we're saving.
 
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