The One Account

desborough

Depends on your situation really. I have been a one account customer for about 4 years now, unfortunately my wife had to give up work after about three months and we have not had much disposable income to put into it since, so it hasn't been the best choice for us.

yus786

I've been with the one account for nearly 4 years and have never had to pay re-valuation fees.

What i've done is call Halifax out with a view to sell.
They value the house at £X.
I send this letter to TOA with a covering letter.
I have to pay £105 for the re-valuation
The house gets valued
I get my £105 from TOA

My house is currently valued at £350,000 and I owe £60,000 - so my interest/saving rate is 5.85%. Cant complain!!!!

Hobo_2

Yes it is well marketed on flexibility & "pay mtg off quicker" If you put all you cash in ,just remember at that point in time you will have no mtg but no savings as such !

bunking_off

Yes but e.g. if you pay your mortgage off 10 yrs early, you'd then have 10 years worth of mortgage payments to use to develop savings.

Seriously, if you're saving in preference to paying down your mortgage, you must be doing so on the basis that you can get a better return from investing a £1 in your savings fund than you do from reducing your mortgage by a £1. Given the latter pays 5.85% net of tax risk free, it'd have to be a pretty good savings vehicle to beat that.

Sure, you don't have savings, but you have the ability to "reclaim" your overpayment by spending up to the agreed facility.

sassybird

yus786 wrote:

I've been with the one account for nearly 4 years and have never had to pay re-valuation fees.

What i've done is call Halifax out with a view to sell.
They value the house at £X.
I send this letter to TOA with a covering letter.
I have to pay £105 for the re-valuation
The house gets valued
I get my £105 from TOA

My house is currently valued at £350,000 and I owe £60,000 - so my interest/saving rate is 5.85%. Cant complain!!!!

So am I right in understanding you've had the house re-valued since the original valuation for the setting up of the One Account?

So the One Account send you the money you've paid out for your valuation (Halifax etc)?

No probs?? This is even better than I thought.

grumbler

I have just general understanding of offset mortgages and have a question to professionals.
Newcastle BS offes nowOffset Base Rate Tracker BOE+0.5% - lower than OneAccount. What are disadvantages as against OneAccount?

yus786

sassybird wrote:

So am I right in understanding you've had the house re-valued since the original valuation for the setting up of the One Account?

So the One Account send you the money you've paid out for your valuation (Halifax etc)?

No probs?? This is even better than I thought.

Well i had to level with them. I said to them that my house has been re-valued at £X and i am not paying you guys to value it and then charge me. So what they;ve done is taken my letter from Halifax, valued the house and then paid me back TWICE.

thaylock

I have had a OneAccount for 1 year & it's works very well for people with a reasonable ammount of savings, I would be hard pressed to find a better mortgage deal than the one I currently have with the OneAccount. A couple of months ago I got my property re-valued which decreased the LTV, which means my interest rate has been reduced from 6.25% down to 6.05%, not bad for an outlay of £75 for the valuation fee. This is a variable rate mortgage so you should make sure if this type of mortgage suits you best - the OneAccount don't offer a fixed rate mortgage. I am literally saving hundreds of pounds per month in interest, best part of all this is I don't have to pay any tax to the taxman on my savings.

bunking_off

thaylock wrote:

This is a variable rate mortgage so you should make sure if this type of mortgage suits you best - the OneAccount don't offer a fixed rate mortgage.

Correct, but informally OneAccount could probably be better described as a tracker. No guarantees that this will continue, but in the 5 years I've had one, they've religiously increased/decreased interest rates in line with the BoE on the same day.

bunking_off

grumbler wrote:

I have just general understanding of offset mortgages and have a question to professionals.
Newcastle BS offes nowOffset Base Rate Tracker BOE+0.5% - lower than OneAccount. What are disadvantages as against OneAccount?

I'm not any kind of financial professional, so treat my opinions with caution. Also, I wouldn't claim to understand the details of the Newcastle scheme (and the website isn't overly helpful!).

I guess the question I'd ask is what the nature of the associated saving/credit account is?

If it's a savings account and you run your own parallel current account, then that implies that in order to be offsetting you need to move funds from your current account to that savings account. That isn't a huge burden (check your current account at the end of the month and clear any excess into your savings - much like anyone would conventionally do), but requires deliberate action. Also, such an approach would mean you lose the benefit of having your salary reduce your outstanding mortgage balance until you spend it.

If it's a fully functioning current account (e.g. cashcard, cheque book, direct debits etc) then this may be pretty much the same as the OneAccount but expressed a different way.

I'm not sure if the facility is there to underpay, however. With OneAccount if e.g. you wanted to take a sabatical, you could just let the interest on the mortgage accrue and accept that it'll take longer to pay it off. Not sure that if you wanted to do that with this style of Offset, you might need to go cap in hand to the Newcastle to ask permission.

Couple of other things that weren't immediately clear;

- is interest calculated daily? For flexible/current account mortgages, that can make a heck of a difference.
- it says the drawdown facility must be agreed at the application stage. In some ways thats the same as with OneAccount you agree the size of your facility, but I don't believe there's much bureaucracy in changing the size of your facility with OneAccount - would Newcastle charge for that?