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Do you have a home mortgage? If you have your own home, I’m sure you do. In line with our previous post on http://www.financecents.com/2009/02/03/to-save-money-take-another-300000-loan/, here’s how to see if you can refinance your mortgage with even lower rates!

If you’re looking to buy a new home, this will also help you!

The Real Group, a local company, has created SmartLoans.sg in partnership with 8 major banks. It’s a free-to-use online mortgage comparison platform that lets you easily search, compare and ask about home loan packages across 8 of Singapore’s main banks! No more spending hours doing online research and talking to many different bank service staff.

So here’s how:

1. Go to http://www.SmartLoans.sg
2. Select “New Home Loan” or “Refinance Mortgage” depending on your needs.
3. Just follow the instructions of the SmartWizard!

When you’re done, you’ll see a chart and a table of all applicable loan packages, nicely sorted in ascending order of the cumulative interest they would have to pay throughout the loan tenure.

You can then opt to connect directly with the bank should you decide to find out more from the bank’s loan officer. But only if you want to! So pretty much a no-obligation thing - I like it! Definitely beats dealing with all the bank officers directly just to ask a few questions, coz they tend to bug you after that.

If you’re worried about having to deal with all the financial terms in order to input your parameters, don’t worry. There’s clear instructions and definitions for every question you have to answer.

It’s pretty easy and it worked for me. Try it!

Are you one of those whose financial situation has gone down with the markets? Lost your job? Hit with huge losses?

You're not alone. But do you have kids and a family to feed as well? I know a friend that lost his job, and yet he still has a stay-at-home wife and a kid, aged 9, to feed. He doesn't like to talk about his financial problems in front of his kid, but I think that's a huge mistake.

Your kids know more than you think. They feel your fear. All their friends are talking about the financial crisis anyway, and maybe they have friends, too, whose family lost jobs and as a result got their allowance cut. If you don't talk to your children about these, you not only scare them more, but you literally give up on a golden opportunity to help them learn something important in their lives.

Use these simple tips:

1. Be honest - tell them what's going on
2. Keep it simple. Don't go into all the economic theories.
3. Tell them why this is happening - especially all the bad financial habits that lead to this!
4. Impact - how does this change things for you and them?
5. Ask for their understanding and help (to be more conservative about money, demands, expenditure, power conservation, etc).

You'll be surprised at how it turns out, probably :) 

Have you talked to your kids before about something as serious as this before, even though they might be under the age of 10? Let us know how it turned out!

Drive a car? Want to subsidize your monthly car payments? Now, consider putting an advertisement on your car for a monthly fee!

Renvertising, a local company, is paying drivers to install sticker adverts provided they drive a minimum of 500Km every month.

Check out http://www.renvertising.com for more details.

The Chinese Lunar New Year, as tradition goes, is a time for households to do some Spring Cleaning. So it’s scrub, wash, tidy and throw. Wait! the things you want to throw might just be worth something.

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