Remortgage Help!

Hi everyone,

Thinking of remortgaging and would be grateful for any advice/info. I know I have to speak to a broker for proper advice but just looking for general help at the mo. We currently have an RBS Flexible Choice Mortgage at 5.84% with 63 months to run and £33,613.36 to pay (£16,988 on Interest Only, £8,316.36 on C&R at 5.84% and £8,309 on C&R at 6.59%.) The monthly payments are currently £386.72. The endowment was missold and I have recently put £8000 compensation into the mortgage and the St Life endowment (as you may have seen in my other thread) can now be sold. This leaves me with two options:

1 Pay the proceeds into the mortgage in which case I would be looking for a remortgage of £19,613.36

2 Pay the proceeds into a loan we have meaning a remortgage for the full £33,613.36

Can anyone tell me if a mortgage as small as £19-20K over 5 years is viable? I know there are a lot of better rates you can't get unless you want over £25k or more so I was just wondering if that is workable. I was also considering perhaps, in both cases, leaving a little on Interest Only as we have £1500 of shares that can be sold next year and then around £1000 per year for the 4 years after that. Would Interest Only for £5500 paying in the share money each year work out cheaper than just paying those lump sums into a C&R mortgage? Obviously Int Only would keep the monthly payments down a bit but if paying into C&R costs less overall then I'd prefer that. So this means that we need a mortgage with an overpayment facility - the ones that allow you to pay 10% without penalty would be fine. Outside of that there are no specific features required.

As the mortgage only has 63 months to run very high start-up fees would be out of the question - ideally I'd be hoping for a fees free deal, may be asking for too much there though! Obviously if there was a deal with fees that worked out cheaper I'd be interested in it but I don't find it likely. Also if I got a discounted/fixed deal that ran say 2 or 3 years would it be feasable to remortgage again for the last 2-3 years of the mortgage period?? I feel that whatever discount I'd get initially would be wiped out by paying a higher rate for the last few years if this wasn't possible. Therefore would a 5 year deal be better for us - can you get a 5 year discounted/fixed rate when the whole term is only five years?? Tracker may also be an option but I'm not as sure on what it entails.

I phoned RBS to see what deals they had I could switch to as that would be easier if the deals were good but everything they offered ended up working out more expensive! They tried to put me off the idea of remortgaging by saying that since the mortgage is at such a late stage nearly everything I'm paying back now is capital and therefore it would be pointless to remortgage as I wouldn't save anything - is this correct? I'm dubious about this and thought they may just have been trying to put me off as when I look at the mortgage statement although £386.72 was paid last month I still got charged approx £160 interest and that doesn't seem like 90% to me. Anyway any general advice and answers to my questions would be a great help. Also does anyone know the best way to go about finding a reputable local fees free whole of market mortgage broker? Are there any sites that perhaps list them and give recommendations that I could look at? Thanks again for all help!

Michelle