Murphy strikes again. A&L have just been on the phone asking if I could send them in. Apparently not asking for them in the first place was an oversight.

So that’s going to be another few day’s delay.

That’s not the only thing contributing to the delay though…

The paperwork from Alliance and Leicester came through yesterday, ready for me to sign and send back.

Or so I thought. It turns out that the Direct Debit form is missing, and without this nothing further happens. And no, they can’t fax it to me, nor can they e-mail a PDF of it to me — they’ve got to send it by post. So, given the urgency with which the Royal Mail typically treats these things I’m not expecting it much before Thursday.

The quid pro quo is that this mortgage isn’t quite as flexible with respect to overpayments. You can make them, but any that are made outside of January are subject to a 3% fee within the first 2 years. Since I rather plan on having some spare disposable income (which I’ve traditionally shovelled in to the mortgage) I’ve had to find something else to do with it.

Fortunately, A&L also do a decent mini-cash ISA at 5.4%, so it’s actually more effective to put the first

In all this the Money Extra website has been especially useful. It lets you drop in your criteria and then spits back all the mortgages that match, with a wealth of useful information (monthly repayments, length of discount periods, true cost of the mortgage over ‘n’ years, and so on) which means I can target the lenders with likely looking products.

After wading through stacks of paper…

Actually, I’m going to go off on at a tangent about that for a moment. One of the useful things the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has done is to require that lenders produce the information about their loans in a common format. This is the “Key Facts Illustration”, or KFI. This spells out, in reasonably plain English, exactly what the offer is, what the cost is, and what the APR is for comparison.

The only problem with this is that each KFI reproduces exactly the same tedious pre- and post-amble around each entry, typically taking between 6 to 8 pages per document.

So to actually compare these things you either have to have 18 pairs of hands to juggle all the documents, or you’re reduced to re-writing the key information (monthly payments, APR, etc) for each mortage somewhere else so you can easily compare all the mortgages on one sheet of paper.

Anyway, after wading through stacks of paper and copying information out in to a spreadsheet to compare and contrast, it looks like Alliance and Leicester are going to be getting my business. They seem to be the cheapest deal at around 5.4% APR while still being flexible enough to let me overpay reasonable chunks of the mortgage (and take the occasional payment holiday should circumstances warrant it). Everyone else with that sort of flexibility is in the 5.6% APR or higher category.

First Active were a strong contender, but after I got over the intial shock at how low their rates were I realised that although they let you overpay without penalty (well, up to 10% of the original loan amount, which would have been sufficient) they don’t let you take payment holidays, or draw down any of the overpayment again should you suddenly need some extra cash. And their rates weren’t quite good enough to make it cost effective to throw the overpayments in to a high interest savings account either.

So, if I’ve made the decision, why the wait?

Two-fold. First, I want to go back to my existing mortgage lender, Standard Life and see if they’re interested in matching any of the existing Alliance and Leicester deals. They probably won’t be, but it can’t hurt to ask, and if they’re prepared to be that flexible then I’m prepared to stay with them as a customer.

And, in amongst all this I had a chat with a mortgage adviser. They couldn’t find any better deals than they ones I’d already found, so they weren’t much use there. But, they did happen to mention that they thought lenders might be producing new special offers towards the end of this week, and that it was worth holding off for a few days just to see what happened.

Which reminds me of another little trick I’m going to try. I’d already found the A&L mortgage offer and decided that it was probably the best for me before speaking to the mortgage adviser. Since they didn’t find any better deals I don’t feel any moral compunction in using them.

But… they’re fee-free, taking a commission from the mortgage lender for each mortgage they arrange. So I’m going to propose that we arrange the mortgage through them, if they’ll split the commission with me 50/50. Which they might go for, or they might not. We’ll see.