MORTGAGES

A mortgage is used for house or property purchase. A loan is given against the security of the property and interest is payable until the loan is repaid. Mortgages can be interest only or repayment. An interest only mortgage relies on a repayment from an ISA, endowment or pension and interest is paid on the full amount of the loan until repayment. With a repayment mortgage, the monthly payments are part interest, part repayment of capital.

We provide mortgage and re-mortgage advice. Installed into our office we have a computer based mortgage information service which covers the whole of the marketplace - building societies, banks, mortgage corporations and insurance companies. This is of considerable advantage to you, letting you choose from the many hundreds of mortgages in the marketplace. Also within the same system we can arrange re-mortgages, whereby you can change your mortgage lender to a more competitive lender with improved rates.

Mortgage providers will normally insist on some form of life insurance to effect the repayment in the event of the death of the borrower ( or one of the borrowers in the case of a joint mortgage). This will be in the form of term assurance for interest only mortgages and decreasing term assurance for repayment mortgages.

Redundancy, accident and sickness insurance

These are sometimes combined in a single policy to provide protection for your mortgage payments, by replacing income lost through redundancy, as a result of suffering an accident, or being off work due to sickness.

Policies for protecting mortgage and related payments can usually be taken out any time. There will be a 'waiting time' which you can choose, before the benefit commences and payment of benefits will sometimes be restricted to a period of 12 months in the case of redundancy and 36 months in the event of accident or sickness. The advantage of this type of cover is that it provides you with peace of mind, ensuring that your mortgage payments can be met for a known period of time.

For long term peace of mind you can effect a policy to replace a proportion of your income in the event of sickness or accident. This is known as Permanent Health Insurance.

Any payments made under the above policies will normally be free of tax. However, the provision of such insurance may affect your eligibility for certain State benefits.

WARNING:- Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on your mortgage.