Is there a tap in your house that drips but you havent yet got around to fixing it? Did you know that by replacing the washer, you could save hundreds of dollars on your water bill in the long term? If this is incentive enough to find the time to fix your dripping tap, wait until you hear how you could save thousands of dollars on your home loan by making just one small change.

Whether your home loan is with Westpac or any other lender, this one change could not only save you thousands of dollars, it could reduce the term of your home loan be several years.

Are you ready? Here it is.

Simply switching from monthly to fortnightly home loan repayments can save you thousands of dollars in interest charges, and clear your debt sooner.

Before you stop reading in disbelief, here is how it works. Say you make monthly home loan repayments to Westpac. This means you make 12 repayments over the course of a year.

Everybody knows there are 12 months in a year, but a lesser known fact is that there are 26 fortnights. Making 26 fortnightly repayments to westpac is the equivalent of making 13 monthly repayments, which means one extra repayment every year than you would make with a monthly repayment scheme.

It may not sound like much, but even one extra repayment in a year can make a huge difference to your Westpac home loan debt. Finding a whole extra repayment in a year can be a big task, but by paying fortnightly, you would barely notice the difference in your cash flow.

Every bit extra that you are able to pay towards your home loan helps you to reduce the principal of your Westpac debt sooner. This means your loan will attract less interest, which means even more of your cash can go towards clearing your principal.

Its common for people to get paid on a monthly basis, so having a Westpac home loan repayment automatically deducted from their account has traditionally made sense. Most home loan products, however, allow for fortnightly repayments and its a simple switch well worth making.