Australian banking joy

Four years ago when we bought our house we were in the market for a mortgage. Banks were quite eager for our business, and quite eager to lend us ridiculous amounts of money. When we selected ANZ, they were prepared to lend us $1.1M, yeah, over a Million dollars, to use towards a house. I'd hate to think what would have happened to us if we'd even fathomed of borrowing anywhere near that kind of capital. In any case we ended up borrowing less than half of that for our home, and in the last four years of squirreling away we've reduced the mortgage by about half. ANZ's been a decent bank, well decent as in about as much of a bastard as the other major banks. They colluded (unofficially of course) with the other major banks and jacked up interest rates well above the RBA's cash rate increments, and when the cash rate fell they didn't pass on the full rate cuts. At least they've been a rather hassle-free arrangement.

However we can't look past that there are lenders out there with substantially lower interest rates with packages similar to that of ANZ. (discounted rate, offset account, credit card, etc.) One of the best I'd found looked to be QPCU (Qld Police Credit Union) which we can qualify for through the Mrs' government job. We contacted them and they were more than happy to come out and go over the paper work to get set up... Overall, based on the rate at which we're paying off our mortgage, switching would save probably around $3,500 so we figured why not. And then the catches started to appear. We would need to pay for an evaluation because our house was purportedly worth more than $Xk even though we don't need borrow anywhere near that. We had to provide stacks of documentation about our credit history, employment history, transaction history, rates, water bills etc. etc. etc. Then when something wasn't all there I'd have to send new copies, then other documents were current enough so I'd have to send updated copies of that. Then the latest statement for our mortgage wasn't recent enough. (since we only get a statement every 6 mo.)

I'm at the point where enough is enough. We're looking to borrow less than 1/4 what we were approved to get four years ago, our house has gone up in value, and we're earning more money. It should be effectively a complete no-brainer. I'm starting to think that they realized they weren't going to be squeezing much money out of us so they're not so eager for our business now. Quite annoying.