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According to our current analysis application fees have practically doubled this past year on the most popular, best deal fixed rate mortgages. Fees for the best two year fixed deals around have increased in the last year from 995 on average to 1,400 over the past year. The cost of three year deals has also gone up from an average of 580 to nearly 1,150. Last October the base rate was 5.75% and the average interest rate of the top five two-year fixed rate mortgages was 5.68%, but now it is 5.57%. Three-year fixed deals have seen a similar tiny reduction in interest rates with the average rate of the top four deals moving from 5.84% to 5.65% over the same period of time. After all the panic that’s occurred in recent weeks in the mortgage market lots of people may be tempted to grab the best deal they can and could wrongly focus on rates to exclusion of other considerations. People really need to consider seriously the cost of these fees. It’s too easy to just focus on the interest rate that’s been charged but especially in a shorter term deal they will have a serious impact on the true cost of the mortgage. Even in todays uncertain financial circumstances there are many good deals to be had but people with not much equity in their homes or without a perfect credit score are unlikely to be able to get some of these deals as Banks and Building Societies and increasingly taking a tougher line. Recent changes to the Consumer Credit Act and also the tightening of the financial markets which have restructured mortgage fees mean that possibly brokers and intermediaries should be pointing their clients towards a secured loan as it could be a much cheaper option than re-mortgaging the family home. The major impact of the changes to the Consumer Credit Act is the fact that every secured loan for residential purposes is now under the umbrella of the Consumer Credit Act and therefore there’s a compulsory cooling off period which takes pressure of the individual and also there is a ceiling on early repayment charges of two months interest (depending on when in the month they tell the lender). When you also take into account that there are no valuation, conveyancing, booking and application fees it doesn’t take a genius to work out that these secured loans are probably more advantageous to the client. So if you’re tied in to your mortgage provider and wish to restructure some finance or raise money for a project then a better alternative to a re-mortgage could be a secured loan. Given the protection of the CCA and the lack of any upfront fees backed up by a simple one month’s interest to redeem a secured loan, clearly they are significantly, cheaper, easier to arrange, more transparent, and possibly more accessible than a re-mortgage.