Operator
Our last question comes from the line of Matthew Clark with Sterne Agee. You may proceed.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
We’ll try this again, can you hear me?
Heng W. Chen, EVP, CFO and Treasurer
Yes.
Dunson K. Cheng, Chairman, President and CEO
Yes.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
I’m sorry. Okay. Heng, maybe a little bit more on the margin. I think you talked about a couple of moving parts but just wanted to make sure we’re capturing all of it going into the first quarter and beyond. I think you talked about the maturation of those structured repos and the full quarter benefit adding about four basis points to the upcoming margin. I think fewer less days will likely help too. Can you talk through the margin here in the upcoming quarter a little bit more specifically? And then beyond that, thinking about again what the curve has done, I know you touched on some of that already. But trying to think about the hedges you have on and what that impact could be going forward.
Heng W. Chen, EVP, CFO and Treasurer
Yeah, I think just the fact that February is the short month. It’s a 29-day month. So typically our margin goes up in the first quarter. And so, if we are at 3.36 in the fourth quarter and just those maturities and the full quarter impact, that’s four basis points if we should get to 3.4%. So we’ve been trying to get there for several years, so I’m hopeful that we might there in the first quarter. And then, in terms of the hedges, our interest rate swap on our trust preferred, that’s a cash flow hedge. So that was fully in place in Q3, and it doesn’t have any incremental change to the margin. And we did add — we had $140 million of fixed rate loans that we hedged into floating. In the fourth quarter, we added another $40 million to that. So the total of $181 million, but basically the full run rate, the cumulative sum of those two is probably six basis points and they are all in the margin run rate already.
And then lastly, one of the things is we have been sitting with $200 million of excess cash at the Fed, our goal is to run that down to about $50 million, which would be just what’s in Hong Kong, in our Hong Kong branch. So that would help give some lift to the margin just because the earning asset base is lower. And so, right now in the first quarter we are basically there where our cash at the Fed is down to, or where our interest-only cash is only $50 million. So I think generally our margin should improve in the first quarter and then it should be steady during the year and might even go up a little bit as we continue to put on loans and reduce our securities position.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
Okay, that’s helpful. Thank you. And then just one more on expenses. You guys have done a great job in controlling expenses. It doesn’t seem like that’s going to change much. But can you offer any color on expenses around the DFAST process? I assume they’re baked in the run rate already? Unless you’ve — trying to get a sense for anything incremental here…
Heng W. Chen, EVP, CFO and Treasurer
Yes. We did have some — Kim, can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we did extensive reapproach to our DFAST process to make it more statistical, and I believe the fourth quarter expenses in order of $300,000 or so, and so that — and we spent some additional amounts in the third quarter, but right now we believe we have transitioned to a more robust statistical model for DFAST. And in the first quarter we will have roughly — one of the requirements is that there is an independent validation of the model process. And so we will have a similar expense of about $300,000 in Q1 but then hopefully it will just be maintenance going forward. So DFAST.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
Okay, thank you.
Heng W. Chen, EVP, CFO and Treasurer
Yes.
Operator
Thank you for your participation. I will now turn the call back over to Cathay General Bankcorp’s management for any closing remarks.
Dunson K. Cheng, Chairman, President and CEO
Thank you for joining us for this call, and we look forward to talking with you again at our next quarterly earnings release date. Thank you.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a good day.
