Remortgaging newbie - What's actually involved?

tcall

I have an offset mortgage with First Direct, and have been paying the SVR for the past 18 months. I want to remortgage with First Direct and wondered exactly what the proceedure is. Is it pretty simple as it's with the same lender, or are there still likely to be a bunch of extra costs (solicitor, valuation etc)?

tcall

Is it a pretty dumb question, or does nobody know lol

dubsey

Giving you a bit of a bump because I would love to know the answer to this too. We also have an offset mortgage with FD but don't keep enough in the savings accounts to make it worthwhile offsetting, so we were looking at changing to something fixed but were unsure of how or even IF we could stay with the same lender.

herbiesjp

You do not re-mortgage with the same lender

You opt for a product switch

Phone up First Direct and ask them for a list of deals that you could move on to.

They should not normally ask for any further information from you unless you are increasing the mortgage amount.

There will be no legal fees or survey fees to pay - but there may be an arrangement fee to pay. Make sure to look into the size of arrangement fee there is, as normally the lower your mortgage amount is, the better it is to opt for a higer interest rate with a lower fee.

Once you have got this list of First Direct options, you can then compare against other offset deals with other lenders to see which would work in your favour

sarkin1

can I ask why you have an offset mortgage and then stay on SVR, you may be lossing money. Have you spoken to a broker about other avaliable rates

tcall

sarkin1 wrote: »

can I ask why you have an offset mortgage and then stay on SVR, you may be lossing money.

Inexperience.
The place is actually on the market but not selling, so i might switch to their 5.79% for 2 years rate, as there's only £99 booking fee, so if the place does suddenly sell, nothing lost really.

dubsey

sarkin1 wrote: »

can I ask why you have an offset mortgage and then stay on SVR, you may be lossing money. Have you spoken to a broker about other avaliable rates

Our reason is different to tcall. We have a friend that in the last boom/bust came off a fixed rate mortgage and his monthly payments quite literally doubled overnight. He then fixed for five years at a ridiculous rate (long time ago but it was something like 14 or 15%) and typically then the rates dropped and was stuck. That scared the pants off my DH and he said he would never have a fixed rate, he would rather that the mortgage payments went up a little now and again that we could cover rather than one hit. This seemed to justify itself in December when my sister came off her fixed rate and her payments jumped £178 in one month.

After reading this site for some time and looking at advice given to others, I have typed into some mortgage calculators and looked at how much extra we would be paying in interest over a few years and he's now thinking maybe we should fix. We just were not sure if we could.

Thanks to tcall for the thread and for the advice!

Icey77

If you're on the ball about your fixed rate ending you can arrange a new fixed rate to take over from the old one when it expires.

My current fixed rate ends on 30th June so I have arranged a new one (with the same lender - circumstances required this) to start on 1st July. The rate is higher old 4.84 vs new 6.04 so the amount will go up but not as much to their SVR could be. I've also taken the oppotunity to reduce the mortgage term from 33 years and 9 months down to 30 years

There was a product fee in all of this of £999 which can be paid immediately or added to the mortgage. Good thing I was on the ball as the 6.04 is now gone and the rates are 6.49% or 6.99%

Good luck