First Direct refuse to extend mortgage term on affordability!

Carnival789

I really sympathise - if you'd rung up the lender that I worked for a years ago we would have extended it with no questions asked (apart from how long do you want to extend it to!) . I must admit that such a lax attitude surprised me at the time but things now seem to have gone completely the other way... no room for common sense any more.

We recently took additional borrowing with FD, and our experience was like pulling teeth from start to finish. As a former mortgage underwater myself (but not since the recent changes came in to effect) I can't be sure how much of the over-zealous grilling was down to the new rules and regs, and how much was down to dealing with someone that was a complete jobs-worth.

When we told the guy from FD that some of the savings we held came from inheritance around 7 years ago he said sorry for our loss, asked if we were ok and whether we would like anyone to come and join us in the room, because everyone deals with it differently. 7 weeks ago and I'd understand but not 7 years!!! It was like dealing with a robot that was talking from a script.

Good luck with getting yours sorted, and hopefully soon

Thrugelmir

chappers wrote: »

In 2003, my business partner and I took out a self cert mortgage on a BTL property, we only had a 10% deposit and the rent was only 75% of the mortgage payment. They didn't want to see either our own tax statements or those of the business we were running, just a statement from our accountant stating that the business was solvent and a going concern. No affordability checks nothing.

That's not a feature. More a reflection of the lax poorly regulated lending that was allowed at the time. The root cause of some lenders demise ultimately. Northern Rock being by far the largest.

chappers

Yeah as I said not strictly features but I got where the poster was coming from, with regards to the inflexibility nowadays.
Yep our lender was nearly another NR and completely shut down their lending streams and to be fair we were nearly another statistic.
If it hadn't been for the generosity of our families it would have gone belly up on us.
We never intended to really be long term LLs on that one and at one point were 48hrs away from the receivers being called in when there was a slump in our business income.
However we eventually developed the property and made a fairly large profit and without that opportunity or taking that risk, probably wouldn't be where we are now, with a small rental property portfolio and a self funding property developing business.

warmsnow

Well the first feature that springs to my mind is interest only. Certainly writing an interest only mortgage at max affordability is a terrible idea, but if you have an interest only mortgage when you can afford repayments then you are able to build up cash to use elsewhere. Also if something unexpected happens switching to interest only for a year could prevent you going into arrears. I have just called up ybs about this and they said that this option has been withdrawn.

You may disagree, which is cool, but I definitely think this is a feature that we deny to the whole market because clearly some people shouldn't have got them.