Yen Kai's Idea Cast

Time flies and before you know it, the second year of my SOR-pegged loan is drawing to an end. The chart above shows my home loan interest rates over the past 2 years.

As promised, here are the details of the loan packages i have been offered:

Bank A (Refinancing, quoted on 12 Feb)

It's been almost 6 months since i last posted an entry, and during this time more than 10,000km has been added to my car mileage, i have quit my job (without first having found a new job.. for the first time), got married, gone for a two weeks plus self-drive honeymoon across 7 countries in Europe, launched a new e-commerce website, started on my new job, and bought a new property (took up a new SOR-pegged loan for it). Yes, much has happened during this time, but fortunately there hasn't been much action on SOR rates.

Honda Jazz 2009 mileage at 17000+ km (60/40 highway/city) : 13.7 km/l. Still a little disappointing. Nowhere near the 16 km/l that a reader is getting (granted, that was achieved on the previous model, and a manual one at that). Nevertheless, the engine runs a lot smoother now and the mileage is improving, hopefully hitting 14 km/l soon.

Here’s a newsworthy event – The 3-month SOR fell to 0.44% yesterday. This is a whopping drop of 1.1% over the last 3 days! This makes SOR more attractive than SIBOR (3-month) which continues to hold at 0.69%. In fact, at 0.44%, the 3-month SOR is at the same level as the 1-month SIBOR. The fall in SOR might have something to do with the falling US dollar.

The recent property buying frenzy has given rise to increased interest in interest rates, as evident from the higher traffic volume to this blog (thanks for visiting!). I reckon it’s time to do a roundup on interest rates.

Here’s my next and probably final review of the Honda Jazz 2009, after the 10000 km servicing, plus a long distance trip.

The Good:

SOR hits yet another low, at 0.59%. And this happens on my SOR-pegged home loan re-pricing date, bringing the interest rate down to 1.35% for the next 3 months. This is simply amazing. Previously i had been very tempted to switch over to the home loan package pegged to the 1-month SIBOR rate which, at 0.44%, plus the 0.85% margin the bank charges (for 1 year lock-in), stands at 1.29% overall. Compared to that, the interest rate i am getting, at 1.35% fixed for 3 months (3-month SOR) isn’t too bad at all.

SOR just broke through the previous recorded low of 0.68% set on 27 Nov 2008 to hit 0.67% on 27 May 2008, exactly half a year later. One of the driving factors for this is of course is the diving Libor, which happens to be hovering at a range (0.66-0.68%) similar to SOR.

As you can see, the two are somewhat correlated, with the Ten Year Treasury Note Yield (TNX) leading. Watch out for the recent rise of the TNX.