Expenses

Expenses

Determining monthly living expenses is a crucial aspect of the home loan application as they help determine the borrower’s ability to afford the mortgage repayments along with their other financial obligations.

They are normally broken down into 2 categories:

Essential/regular expenses:  groceries, entertainment, utilities, general insurance, transport, telephone, education/childcare etc

Non-essential expenses: private health insurance, other extra insurance (ie. Life etc), private school fees, strata fees etc

Each lender has their own ‘benchmark’ of what they will consider ‘living expenses’ to be, based on your income. This is known as HEM (Household Expenditure Measure). It is important for borrowers to provide accurate and comprehensive information about their living expenses as it can lead to problems down the track and may affect the lender’s decision.

The lender will take rent into account if you purchase a property but don’t intend to live it in, as it will be an ongoing expense.

But if you’re purchasing a property to live in, once the loan settles you will move into it, so they don’t need to factor your rent payments in anymore as an ongoing expense.

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Living expenses include; Housing Expenses, Food And Groceries, Transportation, Healthcare Costs, and  Clothing.

 

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Lenders use the Household Expenditure Method (HEM) based on your family size and income because it is considered unreasonable for someone to spend less than HEM each month.

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