25 years or 35 years

tyllwyd

I think the biggest reason that people don't generally get 35 year mortagages is that they are a relatively recent development, so 25 years feels safer.

Also, in reality you are unlikely to stick with the same mortgage for the whole of those 25 or 35 years, so if you remortgage after, say, 5 years, you might decide to go for a 25 year term again, so that in effect you have a 30 year mortgage although you don't think of it that way.

To be honest, I don't think for the sake of £80 it is worth going for the longer term - if there was more leeway, say £200, it might be a more interesting alternative.

The other thing I've realised is that it is much easier than I expected to change the term of an existing mortgage. We're in a long term fixed mortgage but have a decent amount of equity - we needed to change the term of our mortgage and with our mortgage lender all it took was to fill in a form and pay a fee of £20. So assuming you are within their lending criteria, you aren't necessarily stuck forever with the term you originally chose.