Nothern Rock ,any protest sites you know of ?

No problemo.

It's a really handy site that, will tell you everything about an area, not just house prices. Crime stats, local schools, council tax etc.
 
Write to your MP - the banks are being totally despicable and short sighted about this (nothing new there then). "Oh crap we have a bad debt problem, I know lets make our repayments even more expensive so that its more likely they'll default on their debt and we can have a fire sale of their assets, which will in turn make our bad debt problem more severe - oh crap".
 
starfighter said:
Err it was your fault, why did you buy a house before a crash?
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Where can I buy one of your all-seeing crystal balls?

I bought a house about the same time as OP, with a Northern Rock mortgage, the only difference being i managed to wangle a 5 year fixed rate.

I feel for you mate. I can only hope the market has recovered by the end of 2011 otherwise I may as well just copy and paste your post ready for then.
 
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tell me to bog off if you don't want to divulge, but what is the difference between the NR fixed rate your on and the NR variable your approaching ?

If you cant move to a new lender look at ways to reduce the impact of the variable rate, for example who is your building and contents insurance with ? Morethan do a building insurance with free contents that was less than half what we had been paying to NR. **

Like wise do an energy provider review cause theres money to be saved there.

and food shop on line, you can save a fortune by looking at what you buy before you get to the counter + there's loads of voucher code sites that give you at least free delivery.

In all we knocked over £80 a month off of our out goings which meant that even though we moved to a higher interest rate mortgage our outgoings were less and we were better off

**We left NR in June, moving to Nationwide on a 5 year fixed and got in luckily just before all this happened.
 
LOAM said:
tell me to bog off if you don't want to divulge, but what is the difference between the NR fixed rate your on and the NR variable your approaching ?
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I've got a mortgage for a similar amount as the OP. It's 5.34% fixed rate for two years and Abbey's variable rate is 7.09%. BoE interest rates have dropped by a whole 1% and Abbey haven't passed any of that onto its customers. I assume NR's rates are similar.

I should be OK to remortgage (I put down a 40% deposit and I have some other investments) but paying Abbey's standard variable rate would cost me an extra £200 a month. Not pretty.
 
The thing is, if none of this had happened you'd be in exactly the same situation here, you got a mortgage of X amount with amount Y to pay off a month, you're in that situation now and thats life. The revaluation of your house and the negative equity means, entirely, nothing right now. It means if you'd waited 2 years to buy you'd have saved 30k, but you wouldn't have that house now. I bought a 4870x2 for £335, in 2 years it will be worth £100, what will I do, nothing. Unless your monthly income has changed to a point where you can't afford the mortgage then, it doesn't matter.

The only situation you will find yourself screwed in is if you HAVE to move out before the market picks back up a bit AND you haven't paid off enough of your mortgage so the house sale price can't repay the mortgage, then you'll have lost money. Right now you're in the situation that IF you sell TODAY, you'll sell for less than the mortgage and have to pay off the difference and lose that money. If you don't have to sell today, you don't have anything but a perceived problem that isn't really an issue.

Sure you might be able to get a better mortgage, you might have a worse variable rate now with no where else available with a lower interest rate, these are things you should take into account when you buy. THe point is, if you can afford the repayments, theres entirely no issue and you don't even need to think about it before you want to sell.
 
I figured back when things only seemed "bad" around three months ago that something was going to go horribly wrong with the housing/mortgage market and switched to a 5 year fixed rate mortgage with HSBC.

Wise move seeing as my old 2 year fixed deal would have expired a week ago plunging me into the current turmoil, not to mention my house would also be worth less!

We will see what things are like in five years time when it comes up for renewal again. :(
 
The world will be fixed by then, don't worry (although by definition fixed means horrifically broken, perhaps "back to normal" would be a better description).
 
drunkenmaster said:
The thing is, if none of this had happened you'd be in exactly the same situation here, you got a mortgage of X amount with amount Y to pay off a month, you're in that situation now and thats life. The revaluation of your house and the negative equity means, entirely, nothing right now. It means if you'd waited 2 years to buy you'd have saved 30k, but you wouldn't have that house now. I bought a 4870x2 for £335, in 2 years it will be worth £100, what will I do, nothing. Unless your monthly income has changed to a point where you can't afford the mortgage then, it doesn't matter.
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I don't think you understand the situation.

Many people on are time limited fixed rate deals. They pay X for 2/3/5 years and then switch to a higher, variable amount after the fixed period ends.

i.e., £900 a month for two years then £1100 (variable) for the rest of the mortgage.

The idea, for many people, is that at the end of the fixed rate period they remortgage onto another fixed rate deal. However, if the value of the property has dropped to less than the value of the mortgage, they cannot remortgage.

Thus, they get stuck on a much higher variable rate which they may or may not be able to afford. Obviously people should take all this into consideration when taking out the mortgage, but financial advice can be poor and lots of people are ignorant/overly optimistic.

Negative equity affects even those who are not looking to sell their house.
 
Mines up Jan 2011 with NR aswell and i havent a clue whats going to happen. Is that a realistic amount of time for any kind of cooling with the mortage market?
 
If you're a higher rate taxpayer you should be able to afford the variable payments comfortably I'd have thought?

Basically though, you have no recourse to anyone, so I'd stop thinking about protest sites and save your energy for a bit of overtime!

Unfortunately you bought right at the very peak of the housing market, but no one held a gun to your head and made you buy a house on a 2 year fixed. A cursory glance as interest rates over the last 15 years would have shown that sooner or later they would rise again.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but there's no point sugar coating it.
 
When I remortgaged a couple of years ago NR were offering 10 and 15 year fixed rate deals. The advisor tried to talk me out of the 15 year deal - so glad I didn't listen to her...:)
 
Tunney said:
I don't think you understand the situation.

Many people on are time limited fixed rate deals. They pay X for 2/3/5 years and then switch to a higher, variable amount after the fixed period ends.

i.e., £900 a month for two years then £1100 (variable) for the rest of the mortgage.

The idea, for many people, is that at the end of the fixed rate period they remortgage onto another fixed rate deal.
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Can people not just get a longer term mortgage if they want to make smaller payments each month? :confused:
 
Le_Petit_Lapin said:
Can people not just get a longer term mortgage if they want to make smaller payments each month? :confused:
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Sure ... but it's not as simple as that. Your lender will have to agree to change the T&Cs of your mortgage, which they are under no obligation to do. At the moment they seem to be taking the extreme short-termist view of "lets get as much money as we can out of our customers before we have to repossess their homes", so I wouldn't imagine increasing the term of the mortgage would be in their perceived interests.
 
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