Help!! remortgaging & considering 1 account!

thetonester

Help I'm new to this forum and I'm after some advice as I'm no expert in these areas.

My current mortgage fixed term period is running out and I am considering moving to a offset mortgage like the 1 account.

I'm currently with the Halifax and I'm paying £340 a month at 6.04% on a £50k mortgage with 20 years to go on the full term.

I have 31k in savings which is money I'm "holding on to" for my kids and my mother. This money would be nice to access instantly if required and the kids etc aren't concerend with what interest they are making on this money so I figured the best way to make their money work for me would be to offset it against my mortgage whilst it's sitting in my account.

I'd also ideally like to have a offset account where I could still have lots of seperate accounts within the main account so I could manage the outgoings and keep reference to my different pots of money etc easily as i do now.
ie.
kids saving account
mother saving account
me saving account
joint account
me current account
wife current account

basically like I have set up at present but all lumped together under 1 big account.

so I guess my quetions are

1. What is the best deal at present based on my above finances? and Is a offest mortgage the best way to go based on my money circumstances?

2. Does the best deal out there let me lump all my accounts together as described above?

Please help as it's a mind field out there.

Thanks

Simon22

Well I'm no expert but I do have a One Account.

If you have 30k in savings and only a 50k mortgage, you would instantly end up with only a 20K "mortgage" with the one account and only pay interest on the £20k therefore reducing your monthly mortage fees. You would also have instant access to that £30k.

The flipside is that Virgin's interest rates are above yours so you would need to calculate the difference and what " extra" you would need to pay.

In addition of course you will lose whatever interest rate you currently are enjoying on your £30k savings. In terms of all your seperate accounts Virgin doesn't really facilitate that very well, you essentially end up with one big pot/overdraft as opposed to a mortgage, they don't to the best of my knowledge offer seperate sub accounts within your main accounts although the online account tool does allow you to apportion certain spending to virtual accounts (or it used to).

Finally I'm not actually sure if Virgin will do a mortgage of only £50k..

Need to get on the blower to them and do some research really.

eek

the lloyds tsb offset account works by having savings accounts hanging off it. That would allow all the pots to be separated (its what we used to have).

thetonester

Thanks for the info.

I understand the basics of how the account works. I read a post on this site that stated, in general an offset is viable if you have savings worth over 50% of the mortgage value to offset against. Which is my case.

I've tried looking on the net at different "1 account" types of mortgage and I just get totally lost to be honest. My bank accounts are with Barclays at present so I could just plump for the woolwich but it doesn't look like it's too popular to me.

What I really want is a "1 account" type that gives me the best interest rate at the mo and also allows me to lump all my accounts together under the single account in the manner described in my original post.

the question is - is the 1 account this account? Or are there better value accounts out there for me?

pusscat

I do exactly the same thing with some money I am "looking after" for my Dad - it works perfectly.

I use Barclays (was the Woolwich) and you can choose to lower the payments of pay the extra off the capital - I pay off the capital, so whilst my mortgage payment stays the same, my capital is reducing on two fronts - my capital repayment and the overpayment from the offset. This works as as snowball effect and seems to work really well.

You can have lots of "pots" with different names - I keep this money I am babysitting in a seperate pot and have instant access to it.

I have had no major complaints with Woolwich/Barclays. They muffed up the origional set up of the account and it took 6 months to sort out, but they were polite, helpful, refunded everything with no questions and once that was sorted things have run fine.

Somebody calcualted that you need about 40% in offset to make it worthwhile - I use it because I have my own company and often have VAT and tax money sat around waiting - I offset that so I have instant access but can benefit from it too.

The only disadvantage I can see is I am not sure if you can run several current accounts off it - like you seem to have now. There is just one current account and you would both have access to it as a joint account - can't see it working with 3 individual current accounts - too complex.

Puss
xx

thetonester

Thanks Pusscat

The woolwich would be a nice easy transaction as it'd save me chaning all my direct debits etc.

I'll look into that one in a bit more detail.

cm233lh

IF does something very similar with pots called jars. You might find a better rate there. They're certainly better than One. Don't know if they will lend such a small amount, but worth a try.