Home Loans Ipswich

What You Can Actually Borrow

Three rules set your ceiling, and none of them are obvious from the outside.

The first is the APRA serviceability buffer. Every lender must assess you at your actual rate plus three percentage points, a rule unchanged since October 2021 and explicitly held in place at APRA's macroprudential update on 11 June 2026. So your approval is calculated against repayments considerably higher than the ones you will actually make. This is the main reason you can borrow less than your income suggests, and it is also why lender choice matters. The buffer is fixed, but everything around it is not.

The second is your credit card limits. Lenders count the limit, not the balance. A card with a $20,000 limit and nothing owing on it still reduces your borrowing capacity as though you owed the lot. We go through your limits before anything is lodged and reduce or close what you are not using, because it is one of the few levers you can pull in a fortnight.

The third is lenders mortgage insurance, which generally applies once you are borrowing above 80% of the property value. It can run to thousands of dollars. We model paying it now against saving to 20% against using a family security guarantee, so you can see what each option costs you rather than defaulting to whichever one you heard of first.

Lenders also apply a benchmark for household living expenses, so declaring a very low spend does not lift your capacity the way you might expect. The benchmark takes no account of Ipswich living costs sitting below Brisbane.

One more rule shapes what lenders will do. From February 2026, APRA requires lenders to keep new loans at a debt-to-income ratio of six or above to no more than 20% of their new lending. That is a limit on the lender's book rather than a ban on you, but it does mean high-DTI applications get tighter treatment and lender appetite varies month to month. We know which lenders currently have room, and we lodge with the ones that do.

Fixed vs Variable: How We Help You Choose

There is no universally correct answer here and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What we do is work out which risk you would rather carry.

Fixing buys certainty. Your repayment does not move for the term, which matters if your budget has no slack in it. The trade-off is that fixed loans usually restrict extra repayments, rarely come with a full offset account, and cost you a break fee if you exit early. That includes selling.

Variable keeps your options open. You can make extra repayments, use an offset properly, and refinance without a break cost. You carry the movement.

A split is common and is not a fudge. Fixing part of the loan protects your baseline while the variable portion stays flexible. We size the split around your actual budget rather than picking a round number.

Buying Before You Sell

If you have found your next home while still owning the current one, bridging finance covers the gap. The lender funds the new purchase while the old property is on the market, and you generally pay interest only on the bridging portion until the sale settles.

It works well when your existing home has real equity and will sell reasonably quickly. It gets uncomfortable when the sale takes longer than expected, so lenders set a bridging term and we build the plan around a realistic selling window rather than an optimistic one. Ipswich has been selling quickly, but we plan on the assumption that yours might not.

We work out whether bridging or a longer settlement is the cleaner path for your Ipswich move. Sometimes the answer is simply to negotiate a later settlement date and skip the extra loan altogether.