Switching to interest-only

Harriebabe

Hi!

In a final attempt to get to grips with paying off our debts and whilst we're benefitting from a low standard rate mortgage interest rate, we were planning on switching to interest-only for a couple of years. My partner and I both work in local government (and have done for approx. 20 years) and so were planning on using our pension lump sum amounts as the vehicle to cover the outstanding amount (please, no comments about not deserving these pensions, I've heard it all and more before).

But due to fundamentally stupid math/logic error on our part, failed to realise that we are not due to retire until after our mortgage expires - so our application to go interest only has been turned down.

I asked the chap at Nationwide who was extremely helpful, whether we could extend the term (to my partner's retirement date) and go interest-only at the same time - ie fill in the form to do both together... he said no, we couldn't. My partner rang up a short while after just to double check as he wanted to know why we couldn't do both and was told that yes, we could do that - just fill in the form and send it off.

To cut a long story short, I was just wondering whether anyone on here has done this before and whether there is some obvious reason we can't do it - don't really want to take their word for it that we can do, only to be turned down again in 2 weeks' time!

Any help or advice gratefully received - thank you!