Property news has dominated the financial headlines this week and today is no exception. On the front page of The Times is an exclusive story revealing that Britain’s biggest mortgage lender has decided to increase its age limit from 75 to 80 as it adapts to an ageing population.
The change will be introduced by the Halifax next week in response to shifting ‘demographics and working habits’. It means that for new applications the mortgage term will be allowed to run until the borrower’s 80th birthday. Scottish Widows, which is also owned by Lloyds Banking Group, will bring in the same rule. At present only building societies lend to people over 75. Simon Collins, of John Charcol, a mortgage broker, said that the Halifax’s move was a ‘logical progression’ as it is estimated that a quarter of the population would be 65 or older by 2034. ‘We are living longer, we are having to work longer, therefore we are going to have to borrow for longer,’ he added.And there’s new data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders showing that first-time buyers are taking out mortgages with longer terms than ever before so they can cope with rising house prices. A decade ago just 30 per cent of mortgages lasted beyond 25 years. Now as many as 60 per cent of buyers are taking one out for at least this long. Some struggling buyers are even stretching to 40-year terms to make monthly payments affordable on increasingly expensive properties.
In other news, pension fund shortfalls at Britain’s biggest listed companies have worsened for the third month running, adding to the general anxiety triggered by the travails of Tata Steel and BHS. Falling bond yields sent liabilities — the present-day cost of paying every promised pension in full — to a record end-of-month high of £747 billion, according to Mercer, the actuarial specialist, in a study of FTSE 350 companies. The Telegraph reports that high speed internet will not be automatically delivered to countryside homes after ministers claimed some people living in rural areas do not ‘want to be connected’. Instead fast broadband will only be provided in rural areas on request because, according to a Whitehall document, ‘it is unlikely that everyone will want to be connected’. Campaigners and MPs accused the Government of giving up on providing people in the countryside with a fast internet connection.Meanwhile, fraudsters are impersonating homeowners who have recently died, or solicitors, in order to steal money in mortgage transactions, new research shows. Cases are increasing of thieves using the identities of people who have just died to make mortgage applications to lenders, Experian said.
More commonly, fraudsters mimic solicitors to trick buyers into putting a deposit into the thieves’ account. This money, usually large sums, is rarely refunded by banks. The average loss to this fraud across England and Wales, according to the City of London Police fraud investigators, is £112,310.While the bank holiday break may be a distant memory by now, consider the fact that more than £100 million more was withdrawn from Britain’s ATMs during this year’s May Day weekend compared with last year. LINK, the UK’s cash machine network, has reported that the total value of LINK cash withdrawals between Friday 29 April and Monday 2 May rose by £113 million from £1.603 billion to £1.716 billion, compared with the same period last year. It was the busiest ever May Day bank holiday weekend for the UK’s 70,270 ATMs.
John Howells, chief executive of LINK, said: ‘A mixture of some long overdue good weather, a packed sporting calendar and the extra day off work that many of us enjoy meant that last weekend marked an all-time high in May bank holiday ATM withdrawals.’
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