The best remortgage deals

If your fixed or variable mortgage deal is coming to an end, then it's a good time to start thinking about remortgaging.

The benefits of remortgaging

When you remortgage, you take your existing home loan and move it to another lender. The benefits of doing so are fairly straightforward.

Let's say I have a two-year fixed rate that is coming to an end. When that rate finishes, I'll be moved onto the lender's standard variable rate (SVR). This is a rate set by the lender, which can go up at any time, irrespective of what's happening with the Bank of England Base Rate.

The trouble is, most of the time moving from your fixed or tracker rate onto the SVR means a big jump in mortgage repayments. To avoid having to pay more each month, you may want to consider remortgaging to another fixed or tracker deal. At worst, you'll reduce an increase in your repayments compared to what it would have been on the SVR.

But you may actually manage to reduce the amount you pay each month. This is particularly likely if you have built up sufficient equity in the property that you can drop down a loan-to-value (LTV) band and don't need to borrow so much. For example, dropping from 80% LTV to 75% would open up more competitive deals to you.

Best of all, most lenders will cover the cost of the valuation and legals for you.

So what are the best remortgage deals available today?

Two-year fixed rate mortgages

Let's start by looking at two-year fixed rate mortgages. The plus side of a short-term fixed rate like this is that you benefit from certainty over your monthly repayments, without committing yourself for too long. The idea is that in a couple of years you can remortgage again and hopefully find another cheap deal.

However, with Base Rate seemingly certain to rise in the next 12 months, it represents something of a gamble, and you may pay much more for your next mortgage when the two years end as interest rates have risen in the meantime.

First here are the deals on offer with the lowest interest rates.

As you can see, the fees attached to these mortgages aren't exactly cheap. However, there are plenty of remortgage deals out there that don't charge a fee at all and are therefore worth considering.

Five-year fixed rate mortgages

If you want to remortgage to a longer fixed rate deal, then five-year fixed rates are priced very competitively at the moment. Here are the lowest interest rates around.

Again, there are some absolutely massive fees being charged for the lowest interest rates. If you want a fee-free remortgage deal, here are the best five-year fixed rates.

Two-year tracker remortgage deals

If you don't want to pay a premium for the security of fixing your rate, then a tracker is worth a look. As the name suggests, these rates track the Bank Base Rate and they'll only go up when the Base Rate goes up.

So if you don't expect Base Rate to move too much in the next couple of years, a two-year tracker may work out as the cheapest deal.

Here are the lowest rates around for two-year tracker remortgage loans.

Those fees aren't too bad compared to their fixed rate counterparts. However if you really don't want to pay a fee, here are the fee-free alternatives.

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