Remortgaging struggles are real
Phoned up my lender yesterday to see if there was any additional lending available so we could get our bathrooms redone as well as some other home improvements. House has been valued at £90k more than we paid for it, loan-to-value is at 53% so we'd be on their lowest rates and best prices. Mortgage advisor says "yeah based on your earnings and all the rest of it we'd be able to lend you another £30k at an additional £125 a month. Not bad, I think, we were paying that much in total for the mortgage before our rate switch last year. Spent the evening excitedly looking at all the kitchen/bathroom sites out there, drawing up our dream list of the work we now think we can actually have done, and all for less than doing it on all on finance with the various companies we'd need to use.
Call the lenders up again today to get a proper offer in principle sorted so we can actually start the ball rolling. Speak to someone else, go through the same process and "oh I'm really sorry, the advisor yesterday used the wrong form and there's actually zero borrowing available to you based on affordability -
ZERO. What?! How does that strawberry floating work? How can there be a £30k swing, it's all the same information, nothing had changed from yesterday.
I could afford the extra payment myself, let alone my wife chipping in as well, I just don't understand it. We have friends that have more debt than us (like £10k on credit cards, compared to our £500), more lending commitments, earning comparable salaries in a house with much less equity than us that have been approved a £50k remortgage to get a new kitchen and central heating. It just seems so unfair, we can easily afford to pay more, yet they only want to lend to people that from the outside look like they don't have 2 pennies to rub together. The computer says no, so that's that. No ability to appeal or get a strawberry floating human being to actually look at the numbers, it's just a flat refusal.
Very frustrating and depressing