Many mortgages now come with facilities allowing you to redraw any additional repayments you've made on your home loan. This is convenient and cost-effective when you need money to renovate, to snap up another investment opportunity or to deal with a cash-flow emergency.

But cavalier use of a redraw facility can cost you plenty over time without you even realising it, so beware the increasing ease with which you can access these funds.

For example, last month the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) joined numerous other lenders in offering redraw facilities over the internet, or over the phone, for time-poor borrowers.

It sure beats the old way of arranging a redraw, which involved lining up at the local branch in your lunch hour.

"Filling in forms has been a source of irritation to customers," explains CBA's general manager of mortgage wealth, Lyndell Fraser.

"People are leading very busy lives and they're used to doing everything these days at a time that's convenient."

But when you can withdraw thousands of dollars in extra repayments at the mere click of a mouse, you need to be extraordinarily disciplined to avoid undoing all the hard work and sacrifice it took to build up that precious store of equity in the first place.

Of course, redraw facilities are nowhere near as deadly as line-of-credit loans, where borrowers can run the loan up to its original amount as many times as they like.

Still, people who regularly use redraw facilities to fuel their discretionary spending or even those people who indulge in an isolated moment of weakness will pay the price over time.

"If you're the sort of person who can't handle a credit card every month then I would not be recommending online access to redraw facilities," says Andrew Willink, managing director of the information provider Cannex.

A spare $5000 stashed away can offer a great sense of security in the event of financial strife, but it can also provide a devilish degree of temptation, particularly with the traditional spending excesses of the festive season just around the corner.

The banks say the whole point of a redraw facility is to provide home loan customers with low-cost finance for other personal purposes. "If you have a credit card or store card, that's a very expensive form of debt," says Fraser.

"It's better to redraw against mortgage rates than store card rates."

Others argue that it's better still to avoid overspending and to leave these hard-earned funds where they are, cutting your non tax-deductible interest bill.

"It's about discipline, about not touching the money," says Lisa Montgomery, CEO of InfoChoice.

"Paying an extra $10 to $20 a week can really have an impact, but leaving it there and not redrawing it is the key."

Montgomery says the goal of every home owner should be to pay a loan off as quickly as possible. A loan for $150,000 repaid over 25 years at the current rate of 6.57 per cent will cost $156,000 in interest, she points out.

Bill Rankin, lending director of Smartline Home Loans says easy access to redraw facilities might mean that you don't pay off your home as quickly as you might have done otherwise.

"For people who aren't financially astute, the tendency is to draw back quite a bit so [they] don't get the benefits of [mortgage] minimisation," he says.

It's also important to know how your particular redraw facility works.

Some lenders cap the number of redraws you may make each year, some required a fixed amount of notice, some insist you withdraw a certain minimum amount each time, and others impose a fee each time you redraw (see table). These variables depend as much on the type of mortgage product you hold as the institution.

For example, Complete Home Loan customers with the CBA have a minimum redraw of $2000 with no drawing fee.

While Economiser Home Loan customers wishing to redraw must take a minimum of $5000 and are charged $50 each time they do so.

While financial penalties such as these act as a disincentive to redraw, even occasional use of the facilities can rapidly negate the benefits of the extra repayments you've made.

Willink says that people who register for online or over-the-phone redraws need to have a good understanding of their spending patterns.

"For most people, a home is their savings strategy," he says. "If you eat away into your savings for consumption, then the inevitable happens you won't have much left at the end of your working life."

In any case, the mortgage you select is increasingly likely to have a redraw facility attached to it, whether you like it or not.

However, Rankin warns: "Take it with the intention that you're never going to use it. And then try to forget about it."

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