Zoe Watson and Maxwell Broughton, both 41, live with their two children in a four-bedroom Victorian terrace in Walthamstow, which they bought in 2018 for £540,000. Since then, they’ve had a low fixed-rate mortgage of 2.74 per cent but that’s set to expire this month.
“We recently got a letter from the bank saying that if you don’t do anything, your rate will go up to 7.7 per cent or eight per cent, which is not a fun number,” says Watson. The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee voted to increase its base rate of interest to 4.5 per cent this week, which will particularly impact homeowners who don’t have fixed-rate mortgages.
