Axis Bank rolls out lifetime fixed rate home loan

Axis Bank, a late entrant to home loans, has launched a lifetime fixed rate home loan at an interest rate of 11.75% for a 20-year tenure. This is the cheapest fixed rate loan available in the market and is 250 basis points lower than the fixed rate product being offered by the bank till now. Most banks charge 13-13.5% interest for fixed rate home loans.

Axis Bank is aiming to woo customers uneasy over rising interest rates. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has raised policy rates 12 times since March 2010. The repo rate, or the rate at which banks borrow from the central bank, has since gone up by 350 basis points.

"This is a pure fixed rate loan with no fine print. Customers would have the option of migrating to a floating rate product. However, it would come at a fee of up to 2%," said Jairam Sridharan, senior vice-president and head (consumer lending and payments) at Axis Bank. The bank runs a home loan portfolio of 20,000 crore of which a major proportion is floating rate loans.

Should borrowers bite Axis Bank's 11.75% fixed rate offer?

"I wouldn't recommend this product to any customer as we seem to have reached the peak of the high interest rate cycle," said Kartik Jhaveri, founder & director, Transcend India Private Limited. "It would be advisable for customers to pay half a per cent more and opt for a floating rate home loan product," Jhaveri added.

"Interest rates have to come down with the slowdown in global economya¦(which is) also looming over India. Locking into a fixed rate at this point is a no-no," says Suresh Sadagopan, certified financial planner, Ladder 7 Financial Advisories.

MOST CUSTOMERS PREPAY LOANS

Most customers prepay loans within 10 years. This loan comes with a 2% prepayment penalty. If a customer prepays the loan, she will end up on the losing side. Even if she locks into such a loan, she will be paying a higher interest cost," Sadagopan adds.

Banks do not charge a prepayment penalty on floating rate housing loans, especially if the borrowers pay off the dues from their own savings. Under 'Nishchint', Axis Bank will offer loans up to 85% for properties valued at up to 20 lakh and 80% for properties costing above 20 lakh, the lender said in a statement.

"The bank will charge a prepayment penalty of 2% on the outstanding amount," the statement added. Analysts are wary of the product as they are concerned about how the bank would raise resources for 20 years. Currently, no bank is marketing fixed rate home loan products aggressively.

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Claire Danes sets up in 'Homeland'

It's "confusing" to talk about her character, CIA operations officer Carrie Mathison, because there's still so much to learn: Four episodes are left to shoot in Charlotte, and "these are not a casual four," says Danes, 32, who, sitting in the airy penthouse of the Hudson Hotel, has swapped Carrie's sensible pantsuits for something more akin to Danes' downtown homeland: black ice-pick-heeled stilettos and a sleeveless sheath from her "buddy," Narciso Rodriguez. "There's nothing casual about this show."

Thanks to a tip gleaned from a tense meeting with an Iraqi prisoner, Agent Mathison suspects that a recently rescued eight-year American POW, now heralded as a hero in his homeland, has turned al-Qaeda terrorist. Throw in a cheating military wife, a Saudi prince, high-end hookers — and a sexy, premium-cable patina — and you get a plot and a pace that's "cracky," Danes says. "We are dying to know what happens next. We're just begging for scraps — from the boom man, from the hair woman."questions with Claire Danes

If it sounds like 24— if 24 starred, say, Jackie Bauer — that's no accident: The executive producers of Homeland had a hand in the Fox hit. But where Jack's action was hugely hands-on, Carrie's conflict is partly in her head: This spy is secretly battling bipolar disorder. Which doesn't mean she's not packing, says Danes, a 24 virgin who took a field trip to Langley, Va., and dived into psychology books to prepare for the part. Still, Homeland makes "a real point of never showing a gun."

The small screen has been good to Danes, who won TV's triple crown — the Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards — for 2010's Temple Grandin, the HBO biopic about an animal scientist with autism who helped overhaul the livestock industry. And there's her cultishly adored mid-'90s role as introspective Angela in My So-Called Life.

Still, she initially flinched at the idea of returning to her series roots because of the time commitment involved. The Homeland script, however, proved "too seductive." Danes had been mired in a "real fallow period" after the success of Temple. "What do you do after that? Do you play the girlfriend?" Carrie's salty CIA agent was the first role to come along that was "really engaging."

After all, "I'm no longer an ingénue," Danes concedes. "I'm grown up" — with two homes, a Soho loft five blocks from where she was raised and a country house upstate, and a husband, the British Hugh Dancy, her Evening co-star and now, in a "dorky coincidence," fellow Showtime employee 

Likewise, her résumé is growing up: She plays the mom of a droll, Angela Chase-esque teenager in the recently wrapped indie film As Cool As I Am. She's not looking to play the part off-screen anytime soon, but "eventually, yes, I would like to be completely humiliated by my children."

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