Early remortgage and fees

[Tommie38]

We have a mortgage on a residential property that is up for its 5 year term in September 2022. Plan is to remortgage and increase borrowing in order to extend.

Looking at the lender website, they will allow remortgages within the last 3 months if staying with them, without early repayment charges.

If I would like to remortgage earlier, in order to increase borrowing, is there a way to avoid the early repayment?

Broadly speaking, I am seeing my options at the moment as:
- Wait until June to remortgage with no early repayment
- Take out an additional mortgage now and somehow merge at point of renewing the original mortgage (which doesn’t make massive sense, not least because I would get two sets of fees)
- Pay the early repayment (which is currently 1.2% so not terrible) and have everything in one place.

Without going into the level of lending, current is 2.09% and new rate would be 1.39%. So the 1.2% does not look that bad, particularly given rates are more likely to go up than down.

I also have a mild concern that I maximise borrowing now and there is a market dip next year, meaning that a renewal at that point is not possible / harder.

Thoughts? I suspect June remortgage makes most sense.

[Dave350]

I thought you were able to lock in a rate with a lender 6 months in advance, so you'd have been able to lock in a rate for your original remortgage date without any ERC's.

I'm no expert though, I'm in a similar boat as have a 2 year deal ending in Nov and would ideally like to lock in a 5 year deal before rates start increasing too much.