Removing charge on house

cornerstone13

Hi, hope this is the right place to post.

We will be finishing our mortgage next month (yay - only 28 years !!:D ). It is a Standard Life Freestyle and when we talked to them about the mechanics of the final payment etc, they said we may need to employ a solicitor to remove the charge that they have over our property.

I understand exactly what this is, but does anyone have any advice about if we can do this ourselves ? Is it only something that Land Registry are interested in ? As Standard Life have our deeds, do the deeds themselves show the charge - in other words do we need to have the deeds changed or just the records at Land Registry.

Any advice gratefully received, as always. Thanks

Dan_Collins_2

I am not sure that is correct. Is your property in Scotland?

Once you pay the mortgage off they will return the deeds to you. Some lenders will still offer you the option to have a mortgage of say £100 and they will keep them safe. Although due to space a lot of lenders are slowly droping this service. Why should you pay to have the charge removed, they are the ones who hold the charge!

cornerstone13

Thank you - I hadn't thought about it like that.

We are in England. They said we could keep a mortgage of £250 to keep the deeds safe without charge (other than the interest on £250 of course) or they would charge £20 pa for storage.

They also quoted an MEAF fee which I still have to argue with them about as there is nothing in our T&Cs about it - so I'll add costs to remove the charge to my argument.

Thanks again.