Mortgage company insisting we take our mortgage over 25 years

[BonnieBlueButler]

I've been left a little confused by a meeting with our mortgage broker today and wonder if anyone can shed any light.

We are buying a new house and selling our old house. We are porting part of our mortgage which currently has a term of 14 years. The rest of our mortgage will be new and for the amount £125 000. We have a £50 000 deposit. Our joint earnings are around £60 000. Other debts are a car loan and a small amount on an interest free credit card.

We wanted to take the new part of our mortgage over 20 years and once the first part is paid off in 14 years, to overpay and get it paid off quicker too. All seemed fine but at the meeting tonight, our broker insisted that Barclays would only allow us to have the second part of our fixed rate (5 year) mortgage over 25 years for affordability reasons. We had done the affordability check last time we met with no issues at all. He couldn't really give us a straight answer as to why we couldn't have the term we wanted other than saying our 2 young children will have made a big difference.

He then said that on the day we move into the house, we can call and request that our term be reduced to 20 years and that this won't be a problem. So I'm confused as to why it is a problem now. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm worried that if on paper we can't afford this move, we will leave ourselves with future problems (although the figures really didn't look too bad at all to me). The difference in repayments between 25 and 20 years is about £70 a month.

Thanks

We’ve decided to sort our own life assurance and critical illness. We are going with him for the income protection as I can’t seem to get a quote comparison online. We’ve managed to half the price of the life and critical insurance policy. I know we probably don’t need it all but we have two little kids and I’m willing to pay just for some peace of mind (although not as much as the broker first suggested!).

I’m still a bit confused about the mortgage term. We are tied to Barclays as we are porting a 0.89% rate we’ve had for years. We aren’t paying for the broker. He’s waived his fee as we are buying through the estate agent he’s working for. It’s been helpful meeting him face to face. Barclays couldn’t offer us anything face to face for weeks. We are fully determined to reduce the term (or overpay) so it shouldn’t really have too much impact on us but was just wondering about the reasons as affordability didn’t seem like a convincing one.