I have decided to share my experiences with you guys as you might have gathered by now,although most of are negative views but realistic ones. Those of you who know me, would know that we were looking for our first house and all the related matters. The main and the most important one is and I think always will be finding a mortgage provider. As we had account with HSBC, we decided to get information from them in the first place. Everything looked very easy and achievable, easily made an appointment to see the mortgage advisor, informed the lady of all our situation and what has happened and what are the plans. As we were both new in our jobs, we asked if does that affect anything or not,but we were told NO. Something that I think everybody knows nowadays is,if you buy a house for less than £120,000 you are exempt from Stamp Duty (step taken from Government to help first time buyers to get into property ladder), surprisingly our mortgage advisor wasn't aware of this fact.
After our initial appointment we saw the same lady some more times and she said that she would keep in touch to see how are we getting on with finding a house. She did stick to her promise by calling us every week to see how we did, but when we found the house which we thought was good enough for us, and got in touch with the bank to make a formal application, on the evening before the appointment I received a phone call that as we have not been in our jobs long enough HSBC cannot help us in this case. As you can guess I was so P***ed off that was unbelievable and when I asked how come after coming to bank so many times nobody told about this, I was told that the lady we saw is not actually Mortgage advisor. How would you feel if you were in our shoes?Taking time off from work to go to see someone that has go nothing to do with what you are asking!!!
We have managed to sort our mortgage now and thanks God it's not with HSBC but you think they are good and efficient but it's just a show. I even made a complaint about them but as you can predict nobody got in touch with me,luckily I didn't even need to go back to them.
As an advice for all of you who are thinking of these matters, I believe even if you pay a bit more to get a personal mortgage advisor, it's worth it; saves your time definitely and also you get to see more options.
