Cian Carolan

No limitations whatsoever.

Whereas at a fixed rate, it varies lender by lender.

So some lenders allow you to overpay a certain amount each month on top of your monthly repayment.

It could be 10% on top of your monthly repayment.

And then other lenders will allow you a certain annual amount that you can overpay as a lump sum payment.

So it depends.

And that could be 10% of your mortgage balance.

The interesting thing is overpayments is probably second to interest rate, the most sought after feature on a mortgage.

I would say now that's anecdotal, but that's

10, 12 years experience of this that that's what I find it's the after interest rate it's the next thing that people want most and it's one of the most underutilized features on mortgages.

Yeah now again I don't have exact numbers on this but it's considerably less than what you might think I think it could be as low as 8 or 10 percent of mortgages are in an overpayment position.

Yeah, and then there's people that are coming off historic low interest rates where they may have been overpaying a little bit each month, but maybe that's with their interest rates increasing, that could be that that's now their new baseline repayment.

Like as in if you're paying a thousand a month and you're overpaying by a hundred a month on top, if your rate has gone up by half a percent, it's quite plausible that that eleven hundred a month is now not an overpayment position at all.

So look, fixed variable, there are good reasons why one would go with one versus the other.

But I would say the lion's share of mortgages that have issued over the last decade have been fixed rate mortgages.

High, high percentages are fixed rate mortgages.

So particularly when you're in a fixed rate, you need to be really careful about how much you overpay by.

So if you're in a really fortunate position to come into a large lump sum of money, you could...

depending on the lender, you could walk into overpayment penalties very easy.

So the easy thing to do is to call your lender and ask them, okay, how much can I overpay now?