Financial Analyst

Yeah, well, essentially over the past week, lenders have been passing on the full 25 percentage point increase to borrowers on their variable rates.

So that's lifting repayments across the market.

For mortgage holders, this comes on top of the February move.

So for many households, we've seen rates increase twice in a pretty short period of time, putting additional pressure on monthly budgets and obviously just touching on what's happening with petrol prices.

There's a lot of households that are really managing a cashflow squeeze at the moment

Just an interesting point as well.

Globally, interest rates are elevated, but now Australia is essentially their cash rate is above a lot of the other countries, the USA, the Euro, China, and the UK.

Australia's cash rate now at 4.1% is above that.

Fixed rates have also been moving higher in recent weeks as markets have been pricing in, I guess, further expected rate rises.

Yeah, it's incredible how quick this has shifted.

It was probably three to six months ago, we had fixed rates under 5%.

We're now getting most fixed rates over 6%.

There's some one year fixed rates that are still under 6% that some people are trying to lock in.

But generally speaking now, the two, three, four, five-year fixed rates are now over 6%, some of them well and truly over 6%.

The one-year fixed rates sitting about 25, 30 basis points above where variable rates are sitting.

But essentially, we've seen fixed rates move quite rapidly in the last couple of months.

And we've also seen fixed rates move since the last interest rate rise a couple of weeks ago and also subsequent talk about another rate rise in May.

So a lot of movement on fixed rates and a lot of clients looking at what are our options?

What should we do in this difficult environment?

This is like a decision that one guy made that crashed the whole stock market. That's why we're calling it Orange Monday, not Black Monday.