When should I start my remortgage?

The six-month window

Mortgage offers typically last around six months. That means you can secure a new deal well before your current one ends and complete the switch on the day it expires: no early repayment charge, no gap, no scramble. If better deals appear in the meantime, you can usually swap onto one before completion. Starting early gives you options; starting late gives you deadlines.

Our suggestion: put a note in your diary six months before your fixed rate ends. It's a dull little task that regularly saves people real money.

Product transfer or full remortgage?

A product transfer means staying with your current lender and moving onto one of their new deals. It's quick, involves little paperwork and no legal work, and often needs no fresh affordability check. The limitation is obvious: you only ever see one lender's shelf.

A full remortgage moves you to a new lender. There's more process, an application, a valuation and some legal work, usually handled at no cost to you by the new lender's panel. In exchange you get the whole market to choose from, plus the chance to borrow more or change your term if life has moved on since you last fixed.

Neither is always right. Sometimes your own lender's transfer deal genuinely is the best available, and we'll tell you so. The point is to compare both properly, which is exactly what we do.

What happens if you do nothing

Your loan rolls onto the lender's standard variable rate, or SVR. It's almost always noticeably more expensive than a fixed or tracker deal, and it can move whenever the lender chooses. A short, planned spell on the SVR occasionally makes sense, say if you're about to move house or repay a lump sum. Drifting onto it by accident is just an expensive way of being busy.

Around Weymouth, Dorchester and Swanage we see the same pattern every month: people who started their remortgage early and chose calmly, and people who noticed at the last minute and took what was quickest. Be the first sort.