The Mortgage Finance Blog

The outside observer might think that it can’t be too hard to be a mortgage broker; all you have to do is find the mortgage with the best rate – right? Wrong. What about overall costs, setup fees, early repayment charges, valuation fees, solicitor costs; the list goes on.

A good mortgage broker will look at a huge range of factors before making a recommendation, including:

• Overall cost of remortgaging
• Your current circumstances
• How long you intend to stay in the property
• Your long term plans
• Any early repayment charges and/or exit fees on your current mortgage
• Any special circumstances, e.g. self-employed with limited accounts, property of non-standard construction etc.
• Impact of variation of the mortgage term, so you can be mortgage free sooner
• Market predictions of interest rate fluctuations.

Having examined these and other factors, the broker will make a recommendation. Bear in mind that sometimes a mortgage broker’s best advice maybe to do nothing!

It may be that the lender with the cheapest rate would not lend in your particular circumstances, or that after a cost calculation the product with a higher interest rate worked out cheaper. For example a mortgage with a £2995 lender fee, but with an incredibly low rate may work out cheapest overall for a £400,000 mortgage, but for a smaller mortgage (say £50,000) a product with a higher interest rate but a smaller fee would work out cheaper.

A mortgage broker can save you money in many ways; however, one of the most obvious ways is by shortening the term of a repayment mortgage. Imagine shortening the term of your mortgage by 5 years, if your repayment was £500, this represents a saving of £30,000.