Mortgage brokers

[citoyen]

Mortgage brokers. How do you choose a good one? Better to go local or national?

Are they worth using anyway? Or are you better off doing the legwork to find a better mortgage yourself?

Does it depend on your circumstances? (Being self-employed does complicate my situation somewhat when it comes to finance.)

[chrisbainbridge]

I am not financially literate and therefore defer to experts.  I have a local mortgage broker who searches all the mortgages and does the initial introductions whilst helping with paperwork, etc.  I too am partially self employed which makes life difficult.  I would always use our mortgage broker and our insurance broker.

[igauk]

Mortgage brokers can be useful in your circumstances as they sometimes have access to 'broker only' deals, especially for situations like more than the usual 3 x salary, self-employed etc. We're about to move house and used Charcol (https://www.charcol.co.uk) to suss out the market, but then just went direct to the Yorkshire Building Society who we've been with for years and turned out to be very competitive.

[Ben T]

Not sure if helps you with broker question but RBS are ok with me being self employed, i just had to submit tax returns and accounts.
Pretty good to deal with as well.

[citoyen]

I've been doing some research elsewhere and found this guide to remortgaging on Money Saving Expert, which all seems very sensible:
https://images6.moneysavingexpert.com/images/documents/RemortgageGuide-latest.pdf

Based on this, I think going via a broker is definitely the best option. But it has also given me some cause to wonder if remortgaging right now is the best thing to do... Hmmm. Plenty to think about.

igauk - we've used Charcol in the (fairly distant) past and found them very good. Might be worth getting in touch with them again. Thanks for reminding me of them. I've also discovered that Which? now have a mortgage service and as we're members, that might be a worthwhile option.

One way or another, I think I definitely need qualified professional advice on this matter.