Halifax Mortgage

nickybeal

Hi,
Could anyone please give me any advice regarding my mortgage deal. Basically we took out a mortgage for £40,000 nine years ago, the house price was £42,000 at the time.Our monthly payments are £289 which considering house prices now is pretty low as far as I know! We want to add probably about £10,000 to our mortgage because we are in need of new windows, kitchen, bathroom etc and I wondered if anyone had any experience with this and whether they knew roughly how much more we'd have to pay each month to get this? The mortgage is with the Halifax and I guess it would depend on what mortgage deal we have, I don't know this offhand but could find out! We basically want to know if we can afford to do it, if it's too much we will just loan enough for the windows and kitchen!

Thank you
Nicky

happybroker

the halifax will go through the different figures with you over the telephone and once you have those you can start to shop around to make sure you have the best deal.

not knowing how long you want to borrow the £10k over it's difficult to tell you how much this would cost but as an indication;

at 7% over 15 yrs £90 per month and £120 per month over 10 years (for the £10k only)

nickybeal

Hi,
Thanks for your reply! Well we would be looking at extending it over the length of the mortgage that is left which is now 16 years as we have paid for 9 years.

Thank you
Nicky

_Andy_

Oh dear - more spam.

nickybeal

Oh right, thanks John. Is this spam then? I'm pretty new to this website!:rolleyes:

JimmyTheWig

I think it was the JohnMartin post that is being refered to as spam. I presume that _Andy_ has reported it.

JimmyTheWig

Ok, here's a suggestion.

How about you add the £10k onto your mortgage and don't pay much extra a month at all?

My thinking is that if you have held your mortgage for 9 years then you will be out of any introductory offer that you were on and are free to remortgage.

You may think that "remortgage" is a dirty word. That it's for people who can't cope with what they've got, or for those wanting to risk money in a half-baked business idea. You might think that. But you would be wrong if you did.
Remortgaging basically just means getting a better deal.

So you're currently probably paying 7.0% on your mortgage. That means in interest you will be paying about £2800 a year on a £40k mortgage.
Abbey's three year tracker, for example, is 5.79%. This interest on a _£50k_ mortgage would be £2895 - just £95 a year (£8 a month) more than you're paying now.
Of course your repayments would go up by more than this as you have the extra £10k to pay off. And there's bound to be fees for the Abbey mortgage.
But Abbey was the first mortgage company that I thought of. A mortgage broker could almost definitely find you a better deal than this.

Remortgaging away from the standard variable rate that you are on will probably be the best way to save money that you can do, even with such a "small" mortgage as yours.

nickybeal

Hi Jimmy,
Thanks very much for your advice, that's definitely worth doing! I spoke to my boyfriend at the weekend about this and he was concerned with the credit crunch and how much more we'd have to pay but I did say maybe if we had another mortgage deal it wouldn't make much difference but I wasn't sure!

Thanks again
Nicky

JimmyTheWig

No probs.
As you say with the credit crunch, you would have been better if you did this a year or so ago! But that's hindsight for you.

More than anything, the credit crunch has made banks stricter about who they lend to. There's not as much money floating around as there once was and so they are only choosing the "best" customers to deal with.

I would imagine, though, that in your situation you are talking about a low loan to value (i.e. the amount of your mortgage would be low compared to the value of your house) and a low earnings multiple (i.e. you will not be borrowing many times your joint annual salary) which _will_ make you one of the "best" customers and so you won't have a problem.

nickybeal

Thank you, maybe i'll give it a go then..ooh fingers crossed then!

opinions4u

If you do remortgage, look at all options.

If you have a 5 year old, for example, consider shortening the term of the loan t 13 years. It won't up the payments significantly but can free you up for the nasty bills that hit when the kiddie is 18!