I like to keep a mental note of all the things I will do when I win the lottery (as I remain eternally and misguidedly sure that I eventually will). Not being very interested in cars, my automobile wish-list is fairly short and doesn’t include one of those unnecessarily large suburban-Sherman menaces which are used to ferry one small child to school along a perfectly level Surrey road. I’d probably go for a Maserati GranTourismo for no better than I don’t know anybody else with one.
I actually don’t want for much, and I don’t even think I’d give up work. A big boat moored in Mahon harbour? A villa in a sunny place (with it’s own swimming pool and ample shade to protect my English / Scottish / Scandinavian milky-white skin)? Paying someone to cut the grass? Time to write the book I’ve always wanted to write? Yep, all of these things… but in the last two months, something else has pushed it’s way up to #1 priority…
Having no mortgage.
Until yesterday, our mortgage lender was Northern Rock. For the benefit of those outside the UK (or people who never switch on the television or read a newspaper) Northern Rock have been through a bit of a sticky patch. Everything was going to be okay as long as it’s investors didn’t panic and start queuing up outside Northern Rock branches and withdrawing all of their money. Oh dear…
I momentarily entered a state of the most ridiculous optimism where I thought it might collapse so suddenly that they’d lose sight of the fact that I owe them over £350k. A few seconds later I came to my senses. As far as I was concerned as a customer, the impact on me was that they “were unable to offer a mortgage when our current agreement terminated” or something like that. Not a huge surprise.
So, just 22 months after entering a mortgage agreement on a fairly low fixed interest rate, I was facing the prospect of getting a new one and the knowledge that it would cost me more. Here’s the first nasty fact-of-life about mortgages… for most things in life, when you pay more you get usually something better. With a mortgage, you pay more and you get to stay in your own house. £350 more a month and bugger-all for it.
But it gets worse. Mortgage lenders have worked out that unless you’re very rich, lucky, a member of the Royal Family or a tramp, you need a mortgage. Or you can live in a cardboard box under a bridge. Knowing that most people prefer the first option, the lenders will squeeze as much money out of you for the privilege of being a home owner (some time in the future). Set-up fees, admin fees, we-just-thought-of-this fees… and if you’re swapping lenders, you need solicitors involved. Or do you? To be honest, I don’t know, you really have to take some of these things on faith.
The solicitor experience in this process is not like the solicitor interaction you get with buying a house - you don’t sit in the office of some posh bloke who has a certificate on his wall and tells me that thanks to a late 19th century order I can’t keep pigs on my land (which totally ruined my dream of parading two prize sows down Camberley High Street). The so-called solicitors involved in the re-mortgage process appeared to be no more than a call centre manned by operators with a vague understanding of what might possibly be involved. For example, when you tell them two months in advance that our current mortgage arrangement ends on the 1st of August, it’s not very helpful that on the 28th of July they tell you that completion is ready to happen on the 4th of August. Three days of paying the mortgage at Northern Rock’s very expensive fall-back rate? No thanks, you idiots.
So after this expensive, time-consuming and irritating process, what do we get? We live in the same house and pay out £350 more a month. But it’s okay, because the correct six balls will be drawn tomorrow night.
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