Moneysupermarket's Rankings

Just a caution for anyone who uses this site to compare mortgages.  It compares mortgages by showing you costs over any timeframe you choose (2 years, 3 years, etc).

I found that the comparisons are not always what you expect for a few reasons:

(1) Early repayment charges aren't included - if you chose a 3 year horizon and early repayment charges apply for the first 5 years these costs are not included
(2) Fees added to mortgage are only partially included in cost (what would have been paid over the time horizon chosen)

Because of this 2 mortgages came out looking #1 and #2 when I did my search which in the end are not good deals at all.  Chelsea BS has a 6% cashback with a high 6.94% interest rate but comes out number 1 because the early repayment charge of 6% isn't factored in (you pay it if you repay in first 5 years which is enough time for them to collect a lot of £ on the high interest rate)

The other top mortgage was a 5-year fixed from Abbey with year 1 at 2.99% and years 2-5 between 6.4%-6.5%.  The early repay on this mortgage is 19 months interest, again for a 5 year tie-in!

I created my own spreadsheet to compare mortgages and these two were actually at the bottom over my time horizon (3 years), with Abbey costing £38,000 more than my cheapest alternative!

I'm not trying to slag off these banks as I'm sure they offer other more competitive deals and these loans may be good for some people in certain circumstances.  I'm more writing this to caution you over choosing a mortgage based on this site's rankings alone.

Sites like these should be used as guidelines, but never to make a final decision because they don't always make good comparisons of different options (or explain which options are best for your circumstances) and they don't provide qualitative comparisons of things like service, complaint handling, fulfilling claims, etc.

You can only do so much with numbers alone.

Doesn't moneysupermarket have a early repayment filter so you can choose those with or without early repayments?
There do seem to be a lot of factors, cashback, repayment charges, the rate, term, various types, etc.  It can take ages to work out exactly which is best!

Not sure if you have significant savings but the offset mortgages can be good in this case as you only pay interest on the amount greater than the sum of your savings if these accounts are through the same bank.  Also, you don't pay any tax on your savings because you are forgoing the savings interest to offset the mortgage.  I'm going to investigate this further when our fixed rate term ends next autumn.

Doesn't moneysupermarket have a early repayment filter so you can choose those with or without early repayments?
There do seem to be a lot of factors, cashback, repayment charges, the rate, term, various types, etc.  It can take ages to work out exactly which is best!

Not sure if you have significant savings but the offset mortgages can be good in this case as you only pay interest on the amount greater than the sum of your savings if these accounts are through the same bank.  Also, you don't pay any tax on your savings because you are forgoing the savings interest to offset the mortgage.  I'm going to investigate this further when our fixed rate term ends next autumn.

You're right, figuring out which is best is a nightmare!  I've got a nice spreadsheet I set up to compare all these with graphs showing costs of each mortgage over time.  I've even made it so I can play with future Bank of England interest rates to see impact on variables/trackers.  But there's one item not built in yet, the offset mortgages you mentioned, that's my next step. 

The best deal varies based on your timeframe, but ING Direct looks good a lot of the time.  It's the simplest, maybe that's not a coincidence, the others hide the costs in all the complications!