Remortgaging advice

[Tohaveandtohold]

Just after some advise really. We’ve just bought our house and our mortgage is fixed for 2 years. We’ll be re mortgaging in 2 years but I’m not sure what that entails like will we have to go through all these credit, employment, etc checks again.
In my case, Dh is the main earner and he’s worked for his employer for over 8 years which was good when we applied for the mortgage. However, he now wants to changed jobs and start doing Locum work (pays a lot more but it’s temporary). Will that come against us whilst remortgaging?.

will we have to go through all these credit, employment, etc checks again.

^Yes you will have to. All part of the affordability checks

We remortgaged 2 years ago after first time purchase. We chose to stay with our mortgage company as offered the best deal. It was done online and as far as I'm aware no checks were done again. But I think if you change mortgage company yes they will do checks again.

If you stay with your current lender they just put you on a new deal in my experience.

Only if you are moving to a new lender do they go through the tests.

Thank you all. We would stay with our current lender as they always have good rates for their customers.

A lot of the banks now have some really good retention products so you might be ok with just switching to another mortgage product with your current bank. You will have to check with your bank at the time to see if it's comparable with other mortgages on the market.

We actually had a mortgage broker search mortgages to beat the retention product our bank was offering but he couldn't beat it so we just switched with our bank online. They don't do any checks if you only switch and keep everything else the same like mortgage term, etc.

Yer you have to do all the affordability etc again... Being a locum would affect the mortgage application :-)

If we can’t get a good deal with our current provider, we’ll just go on the standard rates till our circumstances are favourable I suppose.

We stayed with the same provider, but dropped the term by a couple of years, so had to go through some checks.

Exactly what TenaciousP says. As long as you don't change anything on the current mortgage, you can switch to any of their other products and they won't complete any checks. Our initial mortgage was a 30yr term on a painful 4 year fix where interest rates plummeted afterwards (lesson learnt there). Our bank allows switching up to 3 months early without paying the ERC so we switched at the earliest we could(saving over £1200 in interest) with a term of about 26yrs 3mths. But if we had decided to change the term as at the time of switching we could have afforded high payments, we would have had to go through the checks which we didn't want. We just make overpayments to reflect what we would have paid had we shortened the term. It all leads to the same goal.

Our current fix ends March 2019 and we intend to switch with our current bank as one of us is now working part time and we have a baby. I think we wouldn't pass affordability so we are staying put. Even if the full time person earns more than they did 5 yrs ago with 1st mortgage so household income is still about the same, we dare not take the risk. The side issue though now is whether to go for 2, 3 or 5yr fix? Hmmm....

If we can’t get a good deal with our current provider, we’ll just go on the standard rates till our circumstances are favourable I suppose.

You don't have to just automatically go onto their SVR as at the moment most SVR are at higher interest rates than the products they have on the marketn so definitely check these first as you might be able to switch to a more favourable rate when you current fix ends.

BTW - Congratulations on your new home.

We recently product changed with our current provider, we left a 5 year fixed at the beginning of year 5 and moved to a 10 year fixed. We didn't change the term, but the 10 year fixed was a lower rate than our previous rate.

We did it all over the phone, it took about 2 hours, they did go through all our financials verbally but did not evidence anything.

I have to say it's nice knowing what we will be paying for the next 10 years, we also try to overpay so know that each year the "minimum"payment will decrease ☺️

Yes, staying with the current provider wouldn't need all the checks. That's what we did and as it turned out they had the best rates available at the time anyway (Nationwide).

Both my DP and I run our own companies and take our earnings tax efficiently which means we only take what we need and therefore our official earning are lower than if we were employed elsewhere. Our companies have money in them and we could increase our earnings if we needed to but why pay tax if you don't need to?!

The problem with this is that mortgage companies are apparently only looking at what you've actually earned so in our case not a huge amount (though enough to pay the mortgage still).

That's why we:

• renewed with the same provider - no checks; and
• fixed for a 10 year period to avoid having to worry about it for a while (plus it was before the recent rate increases too so knew the rate was only going one way).

As long as your mortgage is portable it will see you through any future house move (though if you've only just moved in I'm sure you're not planning that just yet!).

We are just coming to the end of our two year fix rate. If we stay with our current provider we can do it all over the phone easily with no checks etc. But, we plan to move as can get a better rate with someone else.

We're just trying decide if going for a longer fix rate this time would be best in light of the uncertainty of Brexit etc.