HSBS的还款三种方式：Repayment, Interest Only, HomeStart 有什么区别？

Interest only: you only pay interest every month and you have to come up with a plan to repay the capital cost after the mortgage term; It's more like renting in my view but lots of buy-to-let landlords use it.

Repayment: you pay interest every month plus small proportion of the capital (divided by total number of months in the mortgage term); It's quite common for normal home buyers.

HomeStart: a mix of both. It's a distinct feature of HSBC's mortgages' and you choose to have interest only mortgage in the first a few months/years of the term and then switch to repayment mortgage. The reason why it is appealing is because most young people are buying with other loans outstanding in the first a few years and gradually their finance situation will become better and can eventually afford repayment.

My personal opinion is that if you can afford repayment and are not buy-to-let buyer, always go for repayment mortgage.

谢谢cwang回复，请问如果住几年就卖掉的这种购房计划，应该选择哪种方式比较好呢？

Good question and I haven't even thought of that before. My personal opinion is that payment for interests is the mojority of the monthly payment and even if you opt-for repayment mortgage, the proportion of your capital payment every month would be very limited. A typical example would be a 150K mortgage for 25 years term, the monthly payment for repayment mortgage would be around 900 if the rate is around 5% in which probably 600-700 is for the interests. So you are only paying 200-300 a month towards the reduction of actual debt. It is probably more to do with price up and down I guess.

没太懂，到底哪个好？

what I'm saying is that it's up to you to decide. Be prepared to make a loss as the price is going down and you have to pay stamp duty on top of the property price.

多谢，我去问了HSBC，我觉得HomeStart综合了前2个的优点，又比较灵活，比较好。

Well choice is yours but I personally don't like HomeStart as it is more of a marketing trick to me. You effectively have interest-only mortgage for a few years and then start to repay capital. I'm more keen on repayment mortgage as I can gradually build up equity in my home.