Thursday, September 21, 2006

Stop paying extortionate mortgage fees!

Author: Mark Anthony Harrison

The next time you go to arrange your mortgage make sure you heed my advice and you could save hundreds of pounds in broker fees.

The vast majority of mortgage brokers charge a fee to their clients. You may think that you are not paying any fee because the broker tells you that there are no upfront fees. What he isn't telling you is that the fee he charges is normally added on to the mortgage advance/loan.

Clients very rarely spot this because of the fact that so many other fees are normally added onto the mortgage loan such as legal fees, valuation fees, higher loan fees, etc. So if a broker adds on another £2k who is really going to notice?

Okay, okay,the broker will put it into their documentation but who reads these 12 page documents? I would hazard a guess that not very many people at all.

So all you have to is this...

Ask the mortgage broker if he is charging a fee. If he comes back and says ""No, I don't charge any upfront fees"" then ask him if he charges any fees overall. ie. are there any fees loaded onto the loan amount?

If the answer is a yes and in most cases this is the case, ask him to waive the fee or at least halve what he is asking for. Believe me, most brokers will accept this because what they are not telling you is that they all ready receive a fee from the mortgage lender, in addition to the one they are charging you!

So what do they do, accept doing the deal for just the lender fee (in most cases this is .5% of the loan or 1% for an adverse case)or lose it completely and not earn anything because they won't do a deal.

I think you know the answer....

About the author: Mark Anthony Harrison was previously the Head of Sales for the UK division of a US Mortgage and Investment bank but ventured out onto his own with www.capitalmortg agesolutions.co.uk, a specialist mortgage broker which provides mortgages and mortgage advice to clients suffering from credit problems.

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