What’s your savings account and why do you use one if you have an offset?

If you have funds going into an account other than your offset it makes sense for them to be paying your mortgage so the offset stays as high as possible. Even better, get everything paid into your offset and then pay mortgage and everything else from there.

Ah ok. I am first home buyer so had to idea we can do this. I’ll close all my accounts today and just use offset for everything.

Some banks don’t allow yountondo everything from an offset so might not want to close the others yet. But the Odra is to keep as much as possible in there. It basically free tax efficient money by doing so.

How is it taxfree? Like I am not getting any interest like HISA ?

Yes. Instead of being taxed on interest you earn, youre avoiding interest you would be charged.

But isn’t interest “free money”? Even if it gets taxed I am not losing anything.

The interest you earn is the bank paying you for borrowing your money. Conversely, the interest you pay for your home loan is you paying the bank for borrowing their* money. (*the bank’s money is actually all the bank’s client’s money)

The interest the bank wants from you is almost always going to be much higher than the interest they give you for borrowing your money, as they want to make some money as well. Hence it’s almost always more worth it to minimise the amount of money you lose to the bank’s interest than you gain from your interest.

Hypothetically if you had 400k in savings at 3% and had a 400k loan from the bank at 6%, it’s obvious that the interest you get from the bank will be less than the interest the bank is getting from you. But the trick here is that your 3% is less than that due to tax since it’s money gained, but the 6% is the same since it’s money owed. So it’s more effective to avoid being charged interest from a tax point of view as well.