Northern Rock, where would I like to Port them to?

kevpartner

My wife and I need to move from Milton Keynes to Hampshire to look after our parents so our house is on the market. We chose to market via HouseNetwork.co.uk rather than an estate agent because it seemed worth the gamble given that we've paid HouseNetwork £400 and our estate agent wanted £5,500! The good news (fingers crossed) is that we've had 2 views in the first week and both have put offers in. One was a bit hasty as they hadn't sold their existing house yet but the other is a cash buyer and, as I type this, we are negotiating the price.

Anyroadup. We bought the house in 2005 with a 0.8% 7 year tracker through Northern Rock and we're obviously keen to port that to the new house. Yesterday, my extremely frustrated wife - having spent ages on the phone going through the ins and outs of our finances (we're self-employed, horror of horrors) finally asked the woman on the phone how the process of applying to port a mortgage is different to just applying for a new one - the answer "there is no difference". The only point, therefore, was to keep the lower interest rate for a bit.

Bear in mind the following facts: we don't want to increase our mortgage at all (indeed, one option for us is to reduce it substantially by downsizing). We have never been late with a payment, ever. And we pass the "affordability" test according to the woman on the phone yesterday.

Today we were told that they weren't going to let us have a mortgage on the new property. Why? Because we have credit cards - in fact if we want to have any chance of getting a mortgage with them (so they say) we would not only have to buy a cheaper house (which is fine) but also pay off every single credit card. but, of course, we can't buy a house without a mortgage and we can;t get the mortgage without paying off credit cards, for which we need the equity from the house sale. Finally, the LTV of the new house would be no more than 60%.

Oh, and my wife has just phoned to say we've sold the house at the price we wanted to a cash buyer! And all without an estate agent! Yipee!

One option is to apply for a mortgage with another company or through a broker but I suspect we'll end up having to rent in the new location, pay off the credit cards (total debt around £25k) and then, once the lease is nearing its end, apply for a mortgage. This is likely to mean 12 months in rented since most leases are at least that length.

It makes no sense to me that Northern Rock are content to allow us to remain in this house, with a bigger mortgage, with our credit card bills to pay rather than allowing us to move to another smaller, more affordable, house and pay everything off in one go.

Does anyone have any suggestions for options I might not have thought of? In an ideal world, we'd want to buy down there and do it all in one transaction.