Any mortgage advisors on here?

Worth a try.

Need to get a new mortgage and was looking at 10 year deal as a good option at the moment with the coming economic uncertainty and possible change any government.

Any thoughts?

[maviczap]

Why don't you go to moneysavingexpert.com and see what their advice is.

Quite honestly, I'd steer well clear of long term fixes. I don't think interest rates are going to go up much this year, if at all. And when they do they'll tip-toe up ever so slowly while the effect of each 0.25% increase is gauged. Tracker rates are currently much cheaper.

If you really want the peace of mind of a fix go for a 2, 3 or 5 year fix (10 year fixes are difficult to find anyway).

Try a couple of independent brokers:

http://www.londonandcountry.co.uk/
http://www.charcol.co.uk/

What you could do is take a tracker - work out what you would've paid for a fix (a lot more!) and put the difference in a savings account each month, just in case... then in 10 years time you can give me half your profit!!!

I'd say 10 years is maybe a little too fixed, we almost went for one but thought about it and went for a 5-yr fix in the end.

Why fixed? Did some research into interest rates and historically (from '85 as that's as early as I could find records) they only go down to 3.5% and that was a one-off. I didn't believe anyone would offer a fixed rate mortgage at below BoE base rate, so the limit would be 3.5% (on a no-profit mortgage, for one month!). Because of that, fixed rate deals, although a high %age up on the base rate (i.e. 0.5% vs 5%) were still 'as good as it would get' for a fixed rate.
So reason number 1 for fixed rate - fixed rates currently have decent deals and we wouldn't be done over (for a fixed rate).

Why fixed over tracker? Trackers were only available at a significant % over base - i.e. base 0.5%, trackers were 4% or something. It's low now, but when interest rates go up...if they were back up at their historical previous low, 3.5%, then that'd be a 7% tracker...and it'd probably go higher too.
I am not as certain as ceeshaw about interest rates as I think that once the economy gets moving they will try and reign it in asap. Sure, the first few increases will come in slowly so they can gauge the effect, but once the economy is moving again, people will jump on a low-interest bandwagon for all they can get, and I think rates will at that point rise sharply to counteract it.
So reason number 2 for a fixed - trackers are dangerous.

If you don't want a fixed I would go for the SVR because at least you can jump on a deal without penalty if the rates start going up, and I think it's a little cheaper than trackers too!

I am not sure what I would do if I needed to change now, the rates just seem to bear no link to the base rate.


Sounds like our mortgage was a good deal...3 fixed rate ended last september and we defaulted to a tracker at base rate + 0.99%. Bargain. I think the rate of 0.99% was set when people would have bet their granny's false teeth that interest rates would never get this low.

It's interesting tho that in places like the US, most mortgages are fixed for the lifetime of the mortgage.