Try my new free Mortgage Calculator. The mortgage calculator it gives some nice details including how much interest is added to the mortgage per month.

Can be used as a simple mortgage tool for determining what you could save by paying a little extra to your mortgage each month.

First Time Property Buyers

Like most people these days when we bought our first home we searched for a cheap mortgage from UK banks and building societies.

We searched for the best UK mortgage rates on various comparison websites and found some good/cheap mortgage deals. Unfortunately as I’m self employed and lazy with my accounts (couple of years behind!!) none of the UK mortgages we found was suitable (all wanted proof of income).

So we kept hitting a brick wall when it came to finding a mortgage company that accepted the self-employed that didn’t have up to date accounts :-) We did have a nice sized deposit though (£36K, could have gone as high as £50K).

Free UK Mortgage Advice

So contacted a free UK Mortgage Broker for advice (had nothing to loose, it was free) and within a short period of time we had a 90% mortgage offer that required no proof of income. So we made an offer on an ex-guest house (the one we are renovating now) and the offer was accepted.

Unfortunately the mortgage company wasn’t happy with the property, thought we might use it as a guesthouse so they withdrew the offer!! Our mortgage broker did another search and found us a similar fixed rate mortgage deal with another UK mortgage company that didn’t have a problem with the property and so the house purchase didn’t fall through.

Our mortgage broker also helped arrange our solicitor and house/home contents insurance and life insurance etc… all for free (they get money from the insurance companies not us).

They arranged near enough everything, all we had to do was fill out a handful of forms that was sent to our home (never met anyone, all done by post).

All in all we are very happy we went with a mortgage broker, he found us a very good UK mortgage deal and saved me loads of time searching for mortgages, solicitors and insurance companies.

I’m sure given time I could have got slightly better deals for home insurance and life insurance (wouldn’t have done better on the mortgage), but I didn’t have the time to mess around and the amount potentially saved doing all the leg work myself probably wouldn’t be worth it anyway.

Three Year Fixed Rate Mortgage

We have a three year fixed rate UK mortgage, when the 3 years are up he’ll search for another mortgage deal for us and we’ll keep switching mortgages every 2 or 3 years to save the maximum amount of money.

When it comes to stuff like this I’m way too lazy to try to find better deals (was going to look for insurance quotes at renewal time, but didn’t get around to it), so using a mortgage broker works very well for me.

Update August 2008:

Reducing Our Mortgage

The fixed rate part of our mortgage will run out soon and so our mortgage broker will look into better deals for us. With mortgage rates increasing due to a worldwide economic downturn we are going to have to spend more of my income on mortgage payments.

I hate to waste money and I see mortgage interest as a waste of money (I hate being in debt for anything) and so I’m looking into ways to pay or mortgage faster to reduce the amount of interest we’ll pay long term.

Have been researching products like Mortgage Cycling Revealed (it’s an information product) and have wrote a little about it at the bottom of Reduce Your Mortgage Product Reviews.

Hoping I can use ideas like this to reduce our overall mortgage loan repayments and the length of time we have a mortgage without having to spend significantly more money per month.

Will update when I have a complete plan of action for our future mortgage payments.