Remortgaging - any advice appreciated!

mortgage-dunce

Hi all,

I wonder if anyone would be kind enough to comment on the following:

Mortgage currently with Kensington, ending 11 Dec.
Wish to remortgage but husband is a student and works part-time. I work p/t as well, and we have 2 young children. Abbey is only lender available to us due to relatively low income.

So, Abbey have offered:

3 years fixed at 6.19% with £549 fees.
3 years tracker at 0.89% over BOE with £1500 fee

Both have £150 booking fee.

I'm hopeless at sums, but I reckon the tracker is actually a better deal, despite the larger fee. Although I am aware that if rates go up a lot, it might not be a good deal.

Am I being a mortgage-dunce, as my username suggests?

_Andy_

Hi and welcome to MSE.

Really depends on what's most important to you - do you think with a low income a fixed rate with some stability might be better?

Also what income do you have and how much are you wanting to borrow?

mortgage-dunce

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the welcome - should have said hello I guess, but I've been lurking for a while, so I didn't feel very new, iykwim?

To answer your questions:

Re fixed income - yes, I see the point about stability, but the way I'm looking at it is that Kensington's SVR is very high, so if we don't remortgage until husband working f/t, we'd be paying a high unfixed rate anyway, and we can manage quite a bit more than we're paying now.

The figure is £101000 (house value £160k). Combined income is £24.5k , plus tax credits and child benefit of about £200 pm. We have a student loan until June too.

Thanks for offering to help!

_Andy_

You're welcome.

Out of interest, who's told you Abbey is the only lender that will do this for you?

mortgage-dunce

London & Country - only people I've approached tbh.

We were just going to ride out the SVR with Kensington with my husband being a student. However, he picked up a good job over the summer, which he is carrying on with p/t, and it's related to the subject he's studying. So I thought I'd see if there were any options. (Kind of wish I hadn't now, as have pickled my brain thinking about it all!)

I have contacted First Direct myself but they couldn't lend us the full amount we need.

The current mortgage is i/o and we have no savings plan to back it up, so I want to go for repayment.