BofI top-up mortgage: full investigation of title necessary

Aodhán

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I have a mortgage with BofI since summer 2017. When I got that mortgage my solicitor did a full investigation of title and whatever else was needed.

Since then I've put about €150k into the house. €40k of this is owed to the Credit Union at 7.5% interest, €10k is owed to another bank at 10% over 10 years. There is 8 years and 8 months left. I wanted to get a top-up of €55k from BofI to clear this and pay a cheaper rate. We got approval in principle for the top-up pretty quickly. However, then it got messy.

Our BofI mortgage advisor has been really poor (I'm being very charitable) and has incorrectly advised us on several important issues. One of these is that we didn't need to go through the whole mortgage protection application again. Wrong. We did. More cost. Second was that we didn't need a solicitor as it was only a top-up. The third was when he realised we did need a solicitor he said we could use the BofI solicitor for c. €600. However, that, too, was incorrect. The latest is that we must hire a solicitor to do a full title investigation on the entire property and this will obviously greatly increase our cost and thus the incentive to get a top-up with Bank of Ireland. Rationally, this seems to make no sense at all given that all this was done on the same property for BofI in 2017. What's the logic?

At their request we also got a valuer from their approved list to value the house. It was valued at €685k. The outstanding mortgage is for €453k. We are very pissed off with BofI at this stage and the added costs they are pilling on us for what should be a straightforward top-up on a property they have already established full title to. My questions are: at this stage, would we be better off financially forgetting about getting this top-up with BofI? (interest rate of 2.9% for 3 years fixed but the term is for 25 years) Or staying with our above 2 higher-rate interest rates over 10 years? The incentive in staying with BofI for the main mortgage is that we are due the remainder of that cashback at the end of 5 years/in 2022 and that's worth €4700, I think. What would you do at this juncture to reduce the higher interest rate we're paying on the above €50k? Thanks.
 
Logic of having title investigated is to ensure that it is clear. There could be charges on it since 2017.
 
Why not switch the full mortgage and refinance the renovation loans as part of that? Could go with EBS for example and get the 2% cash back again, which looks like around 10k in your case, plus the other 1% after 5 years (their fixed rate is only marginally higher at 3%), or go with KBC/UB for better fixed rates (or better yet, do both). It's worth finding out your current breakage fee from BOI assuming you're currently on a 5 year fixed rate with them as this may determine whether a switch is worth it or not.
 
Yes, I checked that a month or so ago and the breakage fee was just over €5k on that day so that was a huge disincentive to leave BofI altogether. As far as I can see, therefore, we're stuck with refinancing the top-up with BofI or keeping our two existing loans with the existing two financial institutions.
 
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