Nationwide: using overpayments to reduce LTV?

Bargain_Rzl

Hi all, I hope somebody can help.

I have a £57.6k property* with £39.3k outstanding mortgage with Nationwide, of which £10k is my overpayment reserve. Current LTV based on Nationwide's house price calculator is 68.2% (I confirmed this with their customer services yesterday).

I am currently on SVR, and it is my intention to book a 5yr fixed rate deal within the next few weeks (before they update the house price calculator to the end of Q1 2009!) based on a rate offered to customers with <75% LTV.

I am of course willing to "lock in" as much of my overpayments fund as necessary to ensure the <75% LTV is applicable at the point of booking the new product. However I want to lock in as little as possible to achieve this, while retaining access to the remainder of my funds. In other words, to be at <75% LTV I need to owe less than £43.3k, so I would need to lock in £6k of my overpayments reserve, but I would like the remaining £4k of my reserve to remain earmarked as an overpayments reserve on which I would be able to draw in an emergency without affecting the LTV bracket I'll have signed up to. This reserve represents the majority of my savings and I would be foolish to lock it away in its entirety.

Is this possible, or is it an "all or nothing" scenario? Can somebody who's been through this process please tell me if this is possible and how it works?

Many thanks!

*in fact, this represents my owned share of a shared ownership property - however I have already spoken to Nationwide to confirm that to all intents and purposes my mortgage works like any other when I'm working out stuff like this. Other than the fact that they won't offer new fixed rate deals etc. to shared ownership customers with >85% LTV.