Having had my own place before buying with my partner I had just accepted this as fact.
You get a mortgage, you pay your £999 setup fee and you get on with your life. Come 2/3/5 years time, you shop around for the best rate and pay your £999 fee.
However, as we're both keen on fixed rate mortgages this does put us in a position where we're paying out around £1K every couple of years for the "pleasure" of borrowing the money.
Ultimately this means, on top of the interest, we'll potentially be paying around £10k in fees for the lifetime of the mortgage we have.
I realise there are some mortgages that don't have this fee, usually at worse rates. I'm more than capable of working out which one is the better value (i.e. worse rate with no fee vs better rate with a fee) but it's still a payout of £1k every so often that doesn't sit well with my partner - who is much more frugal with her money than I am!
In my mind, I've always stayed clear of things like lifetime tracker mortgages as even if you're getting a good rate today by the time they start going up you won't be able to secure a good rate before they rocket.
So... am I missing a trick? We do have to pay these fees, don't we? My experience has been that we're unlikely to find rates that give better value for money with no setup fee than with one. Does that align with what other people have found?
As an aside, I realise these fees can be put on the mortgage itself, but so far (over 4 mortgage renewals) I've always just put it on a 0% credit card over 24 months to avoid paying interest on it.
You get a mortgage, you pay your £999 setup fee and you get on with your life. Come 2/3/5 years time, you shop around for the best rate and pay your £999 fee.
However, as we're both keen on fixed rate mortgages this does put us in a position where we're paying out around £1K every couple of years for the "pleasure" of borrowing the money.
Ultimately this means, on top of the interest, we'll potentially be paying around £10k in fees for the lifetime of the mortgage we have.
I realise there are some mortgages that don't have this fee, usually at worse rates. I'm more than capable of working out which one is the better value (i.e. worse rate with no fee vs better rate with a fee) but it's still a payout of £1k every so often that doesn't sit well with my partner - who is much more frugal with her money than I am!
In my mind, I've always stayed clear of things like lifetime tracker mortgages as even if you're getting a good rate today by the time they start going up you won't be able to secure a good rate before they rocket.
So... am I missing a trick? We do have to pay these fees, don't we? My experience has been that we're unlikely to find rates that give better value for money with no setup fee than with one. Does that align with what other people have found?
As an aside, I realise these fees can be put on the mortgage itself, but so far (over 4 mortgage renewals) I've always just put it on a 0% credit card over 24 months to avoid paying interest on it.
