Any1 with BankWest - for transaction, c/c & homeloans? or is there somewhere better?

Hey guys,

We are thinking of changing ALL of our accounts over to Bank West, and wanted to get some reviews on them. We already have their $0 master card, and were thinking of opening a joint transaction account that will be fee free as DH salary will be paid into it.

I am then going to move over all of my high interest savings from ING to telenet accounts (also fee free), and open up kids account for the kids.

Anyway, the reason we were going to do all of this is because we are currently with Police Credit, where we pay no fees, and you used to be able to withdrawal from any ATM for free which was great, but now you can only do it for free from Westpac ones. The annoying thing is they are in Carlton, and you can go into a Westpac branch to deposit, but it takes a few days to be credited.

If i move to Bank West, i think i can use any ATM without extra charges, but i might be limited to the Bank West ones and Westpac, but at least their are 2 branches nearby that are also open late on Thursday and ON SUNDAY!! :dance:

And also this way all my accounts will be at the same place, and therefore when i move money around it doesn't end up taking 2 lots of 2 days to get money credited to places.

So i thought about doing this last week, and then we had a meeting with our mortgage broker about changing homeloans. We are with Wizard, which has been sold to Aussie, and they are basically trying to get everyone to move across to Aussie products. Wizard are not passing on any rate changes, so it means they have gone from being good to very average. We are paying 5.4% currently, and can't even make fortnightly repayments. To entice people to move, they are waving the DAF fee, so for us it means around 20k, unless we wait until July of next year when the DAF fee expires on its own anyway. But we could be spending a year on a high interest rate to do that, especially if there is another rare cut in 2.5 weeks.

If we move over to an Aussie product, we will still have to pay legal & sDAF fee, which will be around $400, plus the next loans application fee.

Aussie is owned by CBA, so we can move to stuff like Bank West and St George etc.

Bank West currently have their Rate Tracker Ultra Home Loan, which is currently 4.9% and will be .9% lower than the average of the big 4 - for 3 years before it reverts, but no fees to leave. It does have a $600 application fee though.

So we are looking at about $1k to change loans, but it will be worth it in under 1 year than paying Wizards high interest rate.

Does anyone bank with Bank West and have a review on them? Does anyone have their mortgage with Bank West? Or can you guys tell me where i can look elsewhere for fee free banking? Or somewhere to look for a good mortgage, that hopefully is still an Aussie product?


ETA: one final question... did anyone ever bank with BankWest and then was offered some incentive to move their mortgage over? I would love them to waive the application fee for me :)

Thanks.