region of £1,000 to £1,500. Having a solicitor who cracks on with the work and will answer your calls promptly will save you a lot of aggro, so a personal recommendation is probably the best way to find one. Failing that, The Law Society website’s ‘find a solicitor’ section lists conveyancers. You do not need to use a local solicitor. You could find a more affordable, reliable one from back home, even if you are buying in London, for example.
You will also need to pay your solicitor certain fees for Land Registry, which charges for changing the ownership of a home into your name, and local authority searches. Budget an additional £300 or so.
Finding a solicitor before you put in a house offer makes you look organized and committed and can help save precious time when an offer has been accepted and you want to exchange as soon as possible.
Surveys
When you get a mortgage your bank will want to check that the property you want to buy actually exists, as well as that it is worth the price you are going to pay for it: the bank does not want to lose money if it has to repossess. It will therefore carry out a mortgage-valuation survey, which you will probably have to pay for: a few hundred pounds. Do not make the frequently made mistake of relying on this as some kind of comprehensive survey of whether or not the house you are buying may fall down.
You need another building survey, by a qualified surveyor, or the less extensive homebuyer’s survey to check for damp or rot or Japanese knotweed or a ceiling that is about to collapse. You are not obliged to have one, but you may regret it if you do not and there are extensive problems in your new home.
Some are considered not worth the paper they are written on, however, so put some research into what kind of survey to go for, and whether it is worth it for the type of property you are buying. Expect to pay from £300 to well over £1,000, according to the HomeOwners Alliance. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors site (RICS.org) is a good starting point.
Mortgage brokers
First-time buyers will particularly benefit from using an independent mortgage broker or mortgage adviser who can help you wade through the different mortgage products that are out there. Brokers can also hurry along a lender and keep things progressing smoothly, filling out all application forms for you. Some brokers charge fees of from £300 to several thousand, others get commission from banks they match up to borrowers, either instead of or as well as a fee.
Broker London & Country does not charge a fee and promises that, though it gets commission, you do not get any worse a mortgage deal than you would if you went to the bank directly.
Do not be bullied into using an estate agent’s preferred adviser. You are under absolutely no obligation to meet their ‘in-house broker’, and it is illegal for estate agents to suggest that the price of the house you want to buy will go up unless you do. A word-of-mouth recommendation is often best, or you can search the website unbiased.co.uk for regulated advisers.
Brokers will try to recommend add-on products while arranging your mortgage – life insurance for example. You will find a better deal by searching elsewhere, so don’t feel pressured by any hard sell (see chapter 9 for more on this).
Choosing a mortgage
What’s actually in a mortgage?
A mortgage is likely to be your biggest financial outlay for the next twenty to thirty years. Choose wisely and you save thousands of pounds. There are a lot of mortgages to choose from, however, so it’s not easy. A broker will help you navigate the market, but first understand what you are signing up for yourself.
How much a mortgage will cost you up front, when you first get accepted for one, and from month to month for the next few years, depends on what that mortgage ‘product’ is made up of and the length of its term. Most are a mix of capital repayment, interest, and arrangement fees. These fees are significant, sometimes several thousand pounds.
The ‘term’ is how long a period you are given to pay back your mortgage. Many are twenty-five years, though the first forty-year mortgages have started to appear. You can lower the amount you pay month on month by opting for a longer term, but longer terms accrue more interest over time. It is a balancing act.
Similarly a mortgage with the cheapest interest rate is not always the cheapest deal over the longer term. You need to work out whether lower arrangement fees mean that you may be better off with a slightly higher interest rate, or vice versa. Banks are clever at making an offer look more attractive with low advertised rates but ultra-high arrangement fees.
Also look out for flexibility. Can you overpay your mortgage without being charged fees if you expect a bumper pay rise in the future? Can you take any break from mortgage payments without penalty if, for example, you know there’s a period when you will see a dip in earnings?
Should you get a fixed-rate or a tracker mortgage?
• BUT FIRST, WHAT IS THE BASE RATE?
The base rate is the national interest rate set by the Bank of England, and it is to the base rate that high-street banks and building societies peg their mortgage rates (as well as their savings rates, see chapter 5).
Following the Crash, the base rate was cut to a historic low of just 0.5 per cent, where it stayed until 2016, when it fell even further to 0.25 per cent. Low interest rates can help to revive the economy, they are good for businesses – borrowing is cheaper – and should make citizens spend rather than save. It is rising at the moment slightly, but is still at record lows. Young first-time buyers have never known anything other than cheap interest rates on mortgages, but it may not always be this way. In 1990, the base rate was nearly 15 per cent, in 1980 it was 17 per cent.
Variable rates, pros and cons
When choosing a mortgage one of the biggest decisions is whether to get a variable rate, a tracker-rate mortgage or a fixed-rate mortgage.
A variable rate is fairly self-explanatory. The mortgage lender sets the price of its variable rate and may at any point raise it or lower it; variable rates will rise when the base rate rises, but banks may set them as they like. All lenders will have a ‘standard variable rate’ (SVR), which is their default product that you will revert to whenever the special deal you might sign up for, say a two-year tracker, ends.
The SVR is usually more expensive than the best mortgage deals on the market, so it pays not to sit on it for any length of time, though many people do. Recent research by mortgage broker Dynamo suggested that a third of people whose mortgage deal expired in 2017 spent forty-two days on the SVR, which cost an average of £371 more than they needed to be paying, in ‘procrastination penalty’.
A tracker rate is a variable-rate mortgage, but one that is actually pegged to the base rate. So for example you might have a tracker-rate mortgage of 1.99 per cent, which
