Remortgaging for the 1st time - got 1 month!

[mizu]

We bought our flat in June 2018 and now need to remortgage by 3 April. Stupidly I thought as we moved in June that the mortgage wouldn't finish until this June but now realise that the mortgage must have been sorted out that April.

We went through a broker - who to be frank was quite disorganised and so won't be using again. Got a letter in the post this week to say I need to remortgage by the beginning of next month.

My question is do I just go online to a website like compare the market? Do I go into my bank? We both work full time so limited on time.

Any information gratefully received.

before you go through all this hassle, first check what terms your existing lender that your original brist hooked you up with is offering for existing customers.

if you stick with the same lender you won't have to go through any affordability checks and the paperwork is much, much simpler. a one page form, everything already preprinted, with a box for the product code for which deal you want ti move to and a box for your signature. the whole thing can be sorted out in a few days.

its likely that your existing lender's terms won't be the absolute best on the market but for the sake of a small fraction of a percent difference in APR vs an enormous difference in hassle factor, it is worth considering.

Just remortagaged last month.
I tried to use L&C but they weren't offering a good deal and kept hounding me by phone and email.
I went on money supermarket, saw that Lloyd's bank had a good deal and sorted it all in branch. Opened an account with them too so get £200 cashback. They managed to get me a fantastic rate and couldn't have been more helpful.
(I used a broker last time but they were very disorganised and got the details of my property wrong which meant the mortage agreement was delayed twice!)

Just to add, I contacted my current provider but they wouldn't adjust the value of the property....we've done a lot of work and the value in the area has gone up but they would only base it on the purchase price! Which gave a rubbish LTV and therefore high interest rate!
By switching I've chopped the interest rate in half, got a cheaper monthly payment and reduced the term by 5 years!

And my current provider was going to charge me a fee much higher than the new provider was. It made no sense!

I always ask my current lender what retention rate they can offer me. I then have the L&C broker check the rest of the market to see if he can find a rate tat could beat my current lender.

The first remortgage L&C couldn't find one better so I switched with my lender and it only took 5 minutes online.

However, the 2nd time round we wanted to borrow more but also had a dependant and DH had gone part time. We knew we couldn't pass our current bank's affordability checks so we had L&C find us another lender. They found us a 1.79% 2 yr fix on a 75% LTV. This was 1 year ago.

do you still have to go through the whole paperwork/affordability/credit check thing if you’re not borrowing more?
If you are just switching keeping the amount the same, not changing the term remaining then no they don't do the checks. However, when we switched with our bank (Nationwide), they had some products that had a product fee and others that didn't. We just did a quick calculation to see how much we would have paid back in 24 months with and without the fees and picked whichever was the lowest balance. As it turned out the fix with no fee but slightly higher interest rate was the cheaper one for us overall.

Also didn't know that if I switch to another provider, I'll be charged for it!!!

Not always the case. When we switched to a new lender, the product that we took didn't charge a fee. We paid something like £30 for title deed transfer or something like that.