What should I do?

Lj61

Hi

Hope I'm posting in the right place, I'm after some advise as I really can't get my head round what to do,

Current mortgage is for £71,000 fixed at 2.99% with Santander until beginning of April 2019.

Property worth £300,000

Early repayment charge is 5% from now until April 2019.

Currently have 14 years left on the mortgage in total.

I can't work out wether it's best to pay the ERC (roughly £3600 plus exit fee) or overpay on the mortgage, and hope in 2019 I can fix my mortgage for the rest of the life of the mortgage.

Main worry is Brexit is official about 2 days before my mortgage is coming off fixed- I know no one can tell what interest rates will be but I'm worried they'll be much much higher. I have a young family and don't want the payments to jump loads. But hate the thought of paying roughly £4000 to end a mortgage and it not be worth it.

Best to jump ship now?

Thanks for your help

daisy_1571

As you say Lj, no one can know the future so whichever path you take you might look back and wish you hadn't but for what it's worth here's what I did....... I got as long a fix as I could each time I had to renew a mortgage. It meant I lost money as we fixed for ten years and the rates kept coming down but I was happy that we were paying a fixed amount and I knew we could afford it. In hindsight of course I wished I'd taken out that 0.5%tracker but thats hindsight. None of us has that. I had a mortgage go from 10ish to 15% over my time as a house owner so paying 8 was good enough for me. My mindset would not have been happy with any sort of variable rate so it was still the right decision for me at the point I had to make the decision.

Later we came out of another long term deal to get another long term deal so had to pay erc which we reckoned was worthwhile at that point for us. So although figures on a spreadsheet might say we lost money over our mortgages I don't care and i dont waste time regetting the decisions we made. We had stability and that was more important to me so yes £4000 is a lot of money to worry about losing but in the long term it won't matter. (And in ten years £4000 probably won't seem so much after all, you could spend that going to florida for a fortnight or buying a crazy dress like i saw on 'say yes to the dress' last night.)

It's just a cost that you might be happy to pay to get a longer term deal that will end at a better place than your current one. Only you can decide whether stability is more important.

Decide what stresses you more, then do that. Good luck with whatever you decide to do, I'm sure you will get other ideas too to help you approach the problem from other directions.

Daisy xx

bexster1975

Hello LJ

It might be worth checking the details of your deal as I know my fixed rates allowed me to " escape" in the last three months. Even if you could only remortgage with Santander in the last three months your Brexit worry becomes less significant.

Just a thought. Good luck

Bexster