Fixed rate help

Rainyday100

Hello there

I hope someone can help. This is quite a saga, so I’ll try to shorten it as much as I can. We have a mortgage with Abbey/Santander which went from fixed to variable last year. It’s not made much of a difference yet because the rates haven’t changed in so long, but with the inevitable rises that are bound to happen soon, we would like to go back to fixed.

The problem is we had a business (cafe!) that made us a fairly big loss for the year and a bit we owned it, during that time we managed to get £13k in arrears which we paid in full after the business finally sold. Unfortunately with work being temporary and erratic we have since managed to go back slightly into arrears, but work has now improved, is regular and much better paid, and we have an arrangement to pay the arrears monthly, on top of our regular payment. We also have a handful of default notices, but we have arrangements in place for everything and are making payments.

Abbey have been worse than useless throughout this whole time, from the very first missed payment they refused to be in any way sympathetic, no payment holiday, no help, no advice, at all, they really didn’t want to know and didn’t care. The only reason we weren’t out on the streets was because of the help we got from a local group that deals with this kind of thing. I can understand (to a point) the mortgage lender being wary, but we had paperwork proving the sale of the business, it just took a long time to go through. Anyway, that’s a different complaint, but where it is relevant is; are Abbey going to be as ‘helpful’ as they have been so far? Obviously getting a fixed rate makes budgeting a lot easier, and I would have thought from the point of view of the Abbey, it makes us meeting payments much more likely.

I don’t know if it’s simply a case of them changing the interest rate, or if we have to go through something similar to a mortgage application, whether our credit rating (really bad) will have any affect on it. I don’t hold much faith in Abbey actually doing something that may help us, but I think from both sides it would be a good move.

Anyway, if anyone out there has any ideas or help, it would be most appreciated.

Thanks for sticking this out !