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I’ve spent the weekend researching mortgages, which can be best summed up by this

@sevitzdotcom So you can waste rest of your life instead? :P - wompkin

What I have figured out is the following

• The Banks hate you
• The Banks don’t really want you to figure shit out
• The Banks hate the web
• The Banks could make this simply and easy to understand, but don’t.
• The banks have shit websites (except for Cheltenham and Gloucester who just had shit mortgages.
• Mortgage calculators aren’t. (At best they could be called monthly repayment calculators)
• There are too many mortgages products in the market. Most of them have very little difference between them and they just serve to confuse.

What I haven’t figured out is why all the so called money comparison websites haven’t figured this out. Since their ‘role’ is to help you figure out what the best deal is, all they really help you do is “sort by a column”. Anyway, their poor business isn’t my problem. Just seems like a massive wasted opportunity.

To help me figure things out, I’ve put together a simple spreadsheet. Ok it’s not that simple, but really it’s not that hard to do. What I’ve found is that while interest rates are low, for a lot of mortgages, their is very little difference between them. Sometimes less than a few hundred pounds after several years.

The other thing I found is that actually the remortgage fee actually makes more difference sometimes than the interest rate. This is normally added onto the mortgage. This seems to be around £1000 on average but some charge a percentage of the remortgage and this can run up to 5 or more times that.

For example, Lloyds offers three mortgages at (rate/fee)

• 4.19% / £1995
• 4.29% / £995
• 4.79% / £0

Now on my mortgage, .1% translates roughly to about £10. So to beat the higher rate, I’d really need a massively lower rate than what the offer for the additional fee.. The 4.19% is a joke and I can’t see any reason for it except to screw people. I threw all three into my model and it turned out the HIGHEST rate mortgage was the best.

So what did I choose?

Well, the first thing is what are rates going to do. I have some concerns that the economy is unpredictable at the moment (which is different to unstable, but predictable). Everyone (where everyone is friends of mine who’s opinions I trust) reckons rates are going to stay low. Still I modelled both a high rate and a low rate scenario.

However assume rates are going to stay low, but will creep up, you want to maximise as low a rate as possible as soon as possible.

1. I was originally going to go with the Chelsea fixed rate 4.39% for 5 years. I figured stability beat everything. However this model only plays out if rate shoot up pretty high, and if that’s unlikely then this becomes a less poor choice.

2. HSBC has a pretty good 2.99% fixed rate mortgage. And their SVR is not bad either (some banks still have massive SVRs). However you need a LTV of 60%, and I reckon I’m probably closer to 65/68%.

3. Barclays has the best tracker rate at 1.49% so this might be a good one to go onto long term. But to get this you need to fix for 3.89% or 4.19% (depending on your LTV), which isn’t bad, but the real benefits start coming in Y3, and circumstances might have changed by then.

4. This leaves First Direct with their 1.89% Offset Tracker. Whilst not as good a tracker as Barclays, you can go straight onto it, taking advantages of the low rate immediately. In all different rate calculations this mortgage came out well.

Added advantages are

• No penalty period. So if rates start to shoot up you can switch pretty easily
• It’s an offset mortgage, so you can benefit from money in savings accounts not tying up cash
• You can take additional loans (to pay of unsecured debt) at the same rate.

So all in all seems like quite a winner. I’ll sleep on it a bit, bit that seems to be what I’m going to go for.

If you want to see my modelling I spent the whole weekend doing (note this is not my actual details, I’ve cleansed the spreadsheet somewhat)

Click on the image to get the FULL PDF (this is just a pretty picture extract)

If you want to look at it in more details, you can download it here. It’s a Numbers ‘09 Spreadsheet (and PDF).

Exporting it to Excel sucked and broke half the fields, but if you want it in Excel format to try fix, let me know, and I’ll send it to you.

If anyone has Numbers 09, and want to know how the spreadsheet works let me know and I’ll tell you.

If you’re just looking at the spreadsheet, these were my assumptions

• Interest rate’s averaged for a year, which I treat as unchanged
• Mortgages don’t combine two different variable components (i.e. tracker and SVR)
• I created ‘trackers’ for banks SVRs based on the rate it is now.
• I haven’t stuffed up a major formula or calculation somewhere

All in all, I think Will (Wompkin) was right.

Here's another handy tip for using FireFox. You know the handy find-as-you -type thing? So for example you search for a recipe on say "grilled salmon" and it opens up into a long page with loads of different recipes, right? So you just start typing salmon and bingbangwang, it just straight to the first occurrence of salmon.

But then what? You want to look for the second occurrence of salmon. Well now there's a problem. Then you have to move your mouse down to the bottom of the screen, click Find Next and repeat through the document. It's a bit of a pain. What's the point of having a handy way of doing things with the keyboard if you need to use the mouse.

Well you don't and the answer was obvious. So obvious there was not much in the way of documentation or information telling you how to do it. Hit F3 and it take you to the next occurrence. The light is so bright is blinding.

Here's a handy tip if you are using Firefox*. You know the form entry fields? Like for comments below where you put in your name? Yes those fields.

Well, you know how they can save details** to make it easier to fill out forms? And you know how they full up with junk and crap from all over the place and stop serving the purpose of being useful as you have so many things in that field? And you know how you try to delete them like you did in IE by pressing the delete key and nothing happens? And you know how annoying and frustrating that is?

Well the trick is to press shift-delete.

Glad to server.

* And you really should be using it, because it's great (I said so) and IE sucks monkey butt.
** Tools, Options, Privacy, Saved Form Information

Tracy Cox (everyone's favourite sexpert) was on XFM Breakfast this morning talking about her new show.

Apparently women have 52 different ways of letting a man know they are interested in him. Fifty bloody two. We're screwed. If I had to learn one a week it would take me a whole year, and by then I would have forgotten the first 11 months worth. I don't have a hope in hell. Beyond "Fancy a shag?" I haven't got a clue.

Side note: This would go a long way to explaining why I thought Jose wasn't interested in me, up until the point she snogged me, and still wasn't 100% sure after.

Now men on the other hand have only 10 ways of showing a girl we are interested. Or in my case 1^*.

^* Staring.

There is no definitive history about how the word "barbecue" originated - or why it's sometimes used as a noun, a verb or an adjective. Some say the Spaniards get the credit for the word, derived from their "barbacoa" which is an American-Indian word for the framework of green wood on which foods were placed for cooking over hot coals. Others think the French were responsible, offering the explanation that when the Caribbean pirates arrived on our Southern shores, they cooked animals on a spit-like device that ran from "whiskers to tail," or "de barbe à queue." [via]

I always wondered where that came from. Although I'll still be calling it braai myself.