Gah. Fixed rate mortgage penalty.

[CocoNutter]

Took out a 5-yr fixed rate that runs out April 2014, as we thought it unlikely we'd get a better deal within 5 years. We now need to relocate. Building Society wants to charge us £6k (so 5% of outstanding balance) to get out of current deal.

There's nothing I can do, is there?

Forgot to say - we were naive, uninformed FTB last time. Won't make that mistake again - fixing for three years max this time!

rent instead for the time being? Rent yours out and rent in your new location until the mortgage is up and then sell. Puts you in a better position all round.

I assuming you can't port the mortgage?

I've always ported mine without any problem.

I'd echo the others: are you sure you can't take your mortgage with you?

Don't relocate and rent, chances are you'd have to change to buy to let mortgage and incur the penalty anyway - def check first!

We had this with DH's old house. We read the small print and were able to overpay mortgage payments by a certain amount each mortgage year. Fortunately we were just at the end of a mortgage year so we could reduce the repayment by about 50%. We had the money to do this because we were renovating and had just sold my house. Not so easy if you don't have access to the cash/ short term loans.

read this. Itmight be worth checking that your mortgageoffer was made inthe correct format as laid outby the ombudsman in the link.

Thanks for the tips. Annoyingly they're not open at weekends so I don't know if they'll port it. If they will, and will also top it up to what we need for a bigger house, we may just have to grin and bear it for a year and pay through the nose. We can just about afford that but it's going to cost a lot! We could stay rent free with the in-laws for a year in new location but presumably we'd not be allowed to leave it unoccupied for that long (?) and we'd have the penalty for switching to buy to let as someone mentioned above.

Gaaaahhh!!!

depending on your building society/bank you can just get a "consent to let" and rent the property out (rather than switching to BTL). Worth asking them. I am not an expert but thought most banks/BS let you port and even increase mortgage if you are upsizing and can afford to do it (the increase would be on a separate 2nd mortgage notionally with different fees, tie-in periods etc so you need to think carefully about tying that in with current mortgage to avoid two sets of fees in future if you remortgage). Some banks/BS let you rent out for a limited period of time (e.g. 12 months) but some let you stay on a residential mortgage with a consent to let indefinitely even if you intend to let the property out long term. It just depends on the bank/building society and their policy at the time when you ask. some also let you switch to interest only for a small fee depending on your circumstances at the time and their policy.

Thanks totallyrandom - a mortgage adviser has spoken to our lender on our behalf (because she knew what she was talking about better than we do!) and they have said that in principle we could switch to another of their products without penalty - in theory I think this means we could get the lower rate (as theirs is only marginally higher than what we could currently get elsewhere), making it doable! Hooray! Not counting my chickens til we get something in writing for them. Also not sure if we'd have to pay the arrangement fee - I'd presume yes but the adviser seemed to think it'd just be a £75 admin fee!!!