This has been widely expected by the financial industry. I’m sure as usual, there will be plenty of headlines in the press about the impact of a rate rise on typical mortgage repayments. However, this will only impact you directly now if you have a tracker mortgage. If you are on any other type of variable rate mortgage (such as a discounted rate or standard variable rate), then there may well be an increase in your mortgage rate, but this is up to your lender as to what they change their rate by.
In recent months many lenders have not increased their standard variable rates by the same amount as the Bank of England Base Rate. If you have a fixed rate mortgage, then this increase will not have any effect on you whatsoever.
There are a lot of mixed messages out there about what will happen to interest rates for the rest of this year and into 2024. There was an article in the financial press earlier this week with opinions from a few economists and many of them predict that 4% may well be the peak for base rates, with maybe the rate reducing through the remainder of 2023.
Of course, nobody can fully predict the future and there are many factors that can affect the direction of interest rates, but the slight reduction in the rate of inflation announced in January does raise some hope that maybe the Bank of England will feel that they don’t need to continue raising rates this year. We can only wait and see!
Over recent weeks and months, we have seen the fixed rates available reduce quite significantly from the highs of October and November 2022. We are receiving emails from lenders every day launching new, lower fixed rate mortgage deals. This is good news for anyone who needs to look at a remortgage or is considering buying a property.
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As a mortgage is secured against your home or property, it could be repossessed if you do not keep up mortgage repayments