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Monday, August 3, 2009

Re-mortgaging with the Royal Bank of Scotland


I've been a home-owner now for about eleven years: bought my first house as the market hit rock bottom and and am still there. Naive as I was then about financial matters, I took advice from a professional and ended up with an
endowment mortgage. I expect you can guess what happened next. Actually it wasn't that bad: I still had fifteen years to run on my mortgage and am young enough to get another 25-year mortgage. So that's what I decided to do.
I have banked with
Royal Bank of Scotland ever since they took over Williams & Glynn's Bank nearly 20 years ago and while I've had other bank accounts as well, both personal and treasurers' accounts for some clubs I've been involved in, as well as building society accounts, RBS have always won hands down when it comes to customer service and helpfulness. Also, and this is VERY IMPORTANT, you can phone your branch up and speak to a real person instead of phoning a call centre and going through endless menus in order to talk to someone who can't or won't help you. So when it came time to re-mortgage, I looked at the available options with the intention to go with RBS unless something spectacularly better came up. It didn't - in fact the current account mortgage I decided on had one of the best rates I could find and in addition, the Bank paid all the legal fees and the valuation fee. The actual process was simple. I filled out the application form and sent it off with the necessary copies of my payslip etc. The bank made an appointment to send their surveyor round and my partner stayed home that day. The bank's solicitors did all the legal work: they are based up north but there is no reason whatsover, with a routine transaction, why I should have needed to see them in person, and I didn't. I did speak to them a couple of times and they were friendly, helpful and phoned me back when they said they would. I had to do very little myself.

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