Finance Battle #3: Investing: IO with PPOR Offset vs P&I

- March 24, 2026

It's often posted that IO is preferred for investment debts. The idea is to direct that money into a higher returning option and free up cashflow.

The typical alternative option is paying off the PPOR, which has a benefit of about around +2% over investment debt (Interest Rate x Marginal Tax Rate).

IO loans typically come at a higher cost, so the money you keep in your pocket comes at a cost.

For this calculation we will see if its worth paying IO assuming the additional cashflow is put into the PPOR offset account.

What is IO

When you use an IO option your principal repayments are deferred for 2-5 years. After this period the loan reverts to P&I. As the P&I period is now less, say 25 years, your borrowing capacity is reduced.

By paying no principal you get keep extra money in your pocket and the investment debt stays higher. As an example, you might pocket $100 at the cost of $20, meaning your investment debt is $100 higher vs $120 lower on P&I.

Once off

What makes IO challenging to calculate is the fee you pay is once off and the $100 stays in your pocket for multiple years.

So if you fix for just 1 year, then revert to P&I the $100 stays in your pocket for the future years, and the $20 cost remains.

Trying to figure out how many years to count the benefit hurts my brain. Is it when the investment loan is repaid, or when the PPOR loan is repaid? Is it when you hit your FI number? I am going with when the investment loan is repaid, as that is the point you are forced to undo what you initially set out to achieve, keep the investment debt high. And given repaying investment debt should be last on your list, this will probably be close to when you hit your FI number.

If you go IO over multiple years, the cost-benefit analysis should still be done on a single year basis. Each year is an independent decision.

If you model IO over multiple years what happens is the later years eat the profit of the earlier years. This gives the illusion that IO does not make sense for many years, it effectively doubles the break even point. So for example the break even for going IO continuously might be 20 years, but in fact the break even is 10 years after the period. So year 1 break even is at the end of year 11, year 2 is end of year 12, etc.

I suspect that this post made this mistake Conventional wisdom is wrong - P&I vs IO as my results are about half its, I got 14.4 years vs its 27 years.

Example

Let's say you have $100,000 investment debt at 6.19% P&I, and 6.65% IO in the 39% margin. This is a 0.46% premium, which is pretty typical these days, although 0.25% is achievable from my quick look.

After 1 year we get

Name	IO	P&I	Delta
Principal	$100,000	$98,813	$1,187
Repayments	$6,650	$7,344	-$694
Interest	$6,650	$6,156	$494
Tax Refund	$2,128	$1,970	$158

The reduced repayments mean you keep $694 cash directly, and indirectly the higher interest rate means you also get more tax back, being $158. Note: I spent far to long chasing an issue that was the tax refund difference.

Cash Kept = Repayments + Tax Refund = $694 + $158 = $852

On the other hand if you stuck it out with P&I you would have $1,187 principle paid off.

Now the question is, how long does it take for the $852 compounding at the higher rate of 6.19% to match the $1,187 compounding at the lower rate of 6.65% x (100% - 39%) = 4.06%?

Method 1: Formula

Calculating the future value of an investment we use the compound interest formula

FV = P (1 + r)^t where P is principal, r is return, t is number of years

Now to find when the two investments meet get:

FV1 = FV2

P1 (1 + r1)^t = P2 (1 + r2)^t

Re-arrange to isolate t

t = ln (P1/P2) / ln ((1 + r1)/(1+r2))

Method 2: Model

Sometimes its hard to simplify all the variables, so modelling can be a useful method. In this model I did month by month.

IO for 1 year then P&I for 30 years with the saved principal and tax return going into the offset.

P&I for 30 years with tax savings going into the offset.

Accounting for the tax savings caught me out. The bank will charge the full interest, and its only when you do your tax return that you get that back. I've simplified that and put the tax savings into the offset each month for now. So for example if you paid $100 in interest, the bank will charge you that much. Later when you do your tax return you claim the $100 as a deduction and get $32 back. I have put the $32 into the offset account.

Something not initially obvious to me was the higher interest means a high tax refund, so we need to account for that going into your pocket.

Results

If we put the $852 into the PPOR offset at 6.19% we get:

Method 1: 14.4 years
Method 2: 14.5 years

This is a pretty long period, so perhaps not worth it.

And if we look at the improvement 1 year after break even, we are up an entire $59. All that effort to save $59!

To make the $59/year (+ compounding) until retirement worth it, we need to have many years, and we need a large amount of debt. If we look at 10 years after break even, we are up $992. If we increase the debt to $1M we are up $9,920. If we increase IO from 1 year to 10 years, well I need to model that but at a guess $50K saved.

Calculator

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