Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

Mortgage Help Scheme Details Released

Dr Strangelove

It seems things have gone a little quiet since Gordon Brown rather hastily announced help for people losing their jobs to pay their mortgage, but more details on the scheme were released last week.

Having spoken to people working in the mortgage industry, it seems that there was naturally quite a lot of interest in the scheme from people who are already having problems paying their mortgage, but there was little the lenders could do at this point because the details weren’t (and still aren’t) finalised.

And despite all of the time spent on this scheme, it seems thatit may only help around 9,000 people, due to the amount of criteria that you must meet in order to be elgible:

As you can see, it’s a long list of criteria to meet, and there are apparently yet more practical issues for the Government to overcome before the scheme is launched, sometime next year.

To make matters worse, what makes the scheme even less effective is that lenders will be joining in “voluntarily”, although many have agreed to it “in principle”.

Having said all of that, if it does get off the ground, then for those few people that qualify it will hopefully mean they do not have to worry about their house beng repossessed, at least for a certain period. They will be able to stop repaying interest on their mortgage for two years. However, the unpaid interest will be added to the balance of the mortgage and will eventually have to be repaid.

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