We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus with Ethel’s as my time has mostly been taken up dealing with mortgage companies.  We’ve hit a snag – our current residential lender has decided it won’t port the mortgage after all.

Truth be told, I’m not terribly surprised.  They’ve been closed for new business for years, have a dwindling number of mortgages on their book, but still have to maintain a staff to deal with us.  When I rang them up to go through the process, they kept having to put me on hold to find someone who could clarify points, because it was so rare that they ever had to do this.  To cut a very long story short, they put all the numbers into their computer, crunched it about a bit and announced that we couldn’t port the mortgage because their system said we couldn’t afford it.

Now, I know things changed in the mortgage market in 2014, but we were on a combined income of about £50,000 when we moved up here and they were completely happy for us to borrow £145,000 interest only, with a monthly payment of £737 because our deal of base rate + 1.1% worked out at about 5.5% at the time.  We’re now on a combined income of about £80,000 plus the estimated rental income (call it £20k after expenses) and they’ve told us that we definitely can’t afford the £115,000 outstanding – in fact, the most they’d be prepared to lend us if we ported the mortgage was….

….wait for it….

£32,500!!!!!!  (And no, I haven’t missed a digit off the front of that!)

It’s down to the credit cards, apparently.  They did say that they’d be happy to lend us the full amount if we would let them take 80% of the value of Ethel’s as security as well, but obviously that doesn’t have a title yet, so nothing they could secure against.

I’m now talking to the lender who’ll be doing the holiday let mortgage to see if their residential arm will take on our residential mortgage, as their commercial arm is happy with the credit card situation, but I fear that we may be stumped until Ethel’s is mortgageable.  I just hope someone doesn’t come along and snap up the other house in the meantime.