Westpac allow new customers to earn either 200,000 or 500,000 Velocity Points depending on the size of the loan.
In this guide, we’ll cover off how this home loan from Westpac works when it comes to earning Velocity Points, and look at the value of the points bonus so you can make your own judgement on whether this product works for you.
More about the Westpac Premier Advantage Package Home Loan
The Westpac Premier Advantage Package Home Loan includes a number of package benefits for a $395 annual package fee. The best place to get the full details on all of these is the Product Disclosure Statement from Westpac (PDF).
The first benefit of interest to points earners is no annual fee on a number of Westpac’s credit cards, including:
- Altitude (including Altitude Qantas)
- Altitude Platinum (including Altitude Qantas Platinum)
- Altitude Black (including Altitude Qantas Black)
You’ll also receive an interest rate discount, and no service fee on a Westpac Choice Transaction Account.
Interest rates are quoted according to each applicant’s circumstances, so there’s no public rate to use for a comparison. You’ll need to value the cost of the home loan and it’s accompanying fees and benefits against Westpac’s competitors or other products, and see which works best for you.
Finally, you’ll also receive a chunk of Velocity Points if you’re eligible for the Velocity offer, and the rest of this guide specifically focuses on how the points component of the offer works.
You may find the Westpac Home Loan through other mortgage brokers and finance professionals too. This guide is intended to cover the points-earning features and capability of the loan and is not a general recommendation of this product. Please review all the necessary information about this home loan to ensure it meets your personal circumstances.
How the bonus Velocity Points work
Firstly you’ll need to be eligible for the offer to receive the bonus points if you decide to go ahead with this home loan.
Velocity offer eligibility criteria
When it comes to timing, you’ll need to submit your application between 11 June and 30 September 2018, and have the loan settled by 30 November 2018.
Existing customers who internally refinance or switch loans within the Westpac Group—so including St.George, Bank of Melbourne, BankSA and RAMS are not eligible for the bonus points. In addition, Equity Access loans are excluded, as well as those using a company or trust accounts for the home loan.
Although this offer is new to market as of June 2018, it’s worth bearing in mind that the terms state that only one Velocity offer can be taken up by the primary applicant of the home loan within a 12-month period.
So, you’ve settled your Westpac Premier Advantage Package Home Loan—how will you receive the Velocity Points?
Once you’ve got through the application, approval and settlement process, you’ll then be able to start the process of collecting those bonus points. This is not just a case of supplying your Velocity account number and thinking they will land in your account automatically.
Once the settlement has occurred, you’ll need to look out for an email/or SMS with a digital code and instructions on how to claim the Velocity Points. At this point, of course, the primary applicant will need to be a Velocity member to claim them.
Once you’ve submitted that code to Velocity then the Velocity Points should be deposited into your Velocity account within 21 days, with confirmation of the deposit being supplied by Velocity.
Finally, you must request these Velocity Points within 60 days of the settlement date, so don’t forget to do that final piece of admin in good time.
How many Velocity Points are on offer with the Westpac Premier Advantage Package Home Loan?
To help understand the size of the Velocity Points bonus you could receive, we’ve created this calculator in which you can input the size of your loan (note, the bonus is based on your settled loan size, not property value or other metric) and see the number of points that could result in.
For loans of $250,000 and over, you’ll receive a bonus of 200,000 Velocity Points. This is enough points for multiple domestic flights within Australia, and enough to reach Asia or New Zealand—plus taxes and fees, of course.
We’ve put together the guides below to show you the best uses of Velocity Points more generally, factoring in our picks of Velocity’s partner airlines, different destinations and the best inflight experiences.
If you need help with redeeming your Velocity Points, then we have that covered with some basic tips.
One of the more popular ways to redeem Velocity Points is for Virgin Australia’s flights in their excellent Business Class on the Virgin Australia A330 fleet, such as to Hong Kong from Sydney or Melbourne.
Finally, with a haul of 500,000 Velocity Points, you might start considering redeeming these for premium travel on one of Velocity’s partner airlines such as Etihad or Singapore Airlines.
Summing up: Westpac’s Premier Advantage Package Home Loan Velocity Offer
We haven’t touched on the relative value of this home loan, interest rates and associated fees in this guide—whether this makes sense for your circumstances will totally depend on other offers in the market vs the rates and fees quoted by Westpac for this product.
The way to think critically about home loan offers including points is to compare any costs and fees of points-linked home loans to those that don’t offer points. If offers that include points are more expensive over the expected number of years that you are planning to service this loan, then you’ll need to decide whether the value of the points on offer is worth paying the additional fee.
We’ve outlined one way to consider the value of points in this guide. Whether it’s a home loan or any other product or service offering bonus points, everyone should consider their own value of points to ensure that they are getting a decent deal.
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