Woolwich £275 redemption fee - can I avoid?

goodlife77

We're moving in about 3 weeks, taking out a new mortgage for the new place and redeeming our Woolwich Open Plan mortgage on the old place.

This redemption includes a £275 redemption fee. I'm sure it wasn't this much when we took out the mortgage in 2003, but I can't find a figure anywhere in the documentation.
I see some people have argued they should pay the fee in place when they took out the mortgage and got a refund, but without any original fee in writing could I do this?

Another thought I had was to redeem all but say £100 or £1000 to avoid the charge - but maybe there'd be other fees involved in doing this.

cheers,

rob.

UK007BullDog

you wont find a figure in your documents about it. They have keept the door open for that. So you would have to pay that fee and it is in keeping with most of the other banks.

jamesd

You can't leave part of the mortgage outstanding unless you still own the place you are moving from. They have a first legal charge on it and they will be able to prevent a sale if the whole mortgage isn't paid off at closing.

The fee is tolerably reasonable as such fees go. If you could document the fee at the time you took it out they would only be able to increase it by an amount to reflect their real increase in costs since then.