This article will go some way to explaining the terms annual review and monthly rest and explain the benefits between the two ways in which lenders calculate interest and as a consequence which is better for you the borrower in particular situations.
There are two ways in which the lenders calculate the interest on the mortgage and deciding which will be of greater benefit depends on the way you plan to pay back the loan. Monthly rest and annual review mortgages are two popular types of mortgage and, it must be said, are both relatively self explanatory, as we will see in the next couple of paragraphs.
With a monthly rest mortgage the interest is calculated on either a daily or monthly basis and then applied to the loan accordingly. The most obvious benefit of this type of mortgage would be if you are repaying the debt on an ongoing basis. That is to say, the more you pay back on the loan, the lower the interest will be on a daily or monthly basis.
The crucial point here is whether or not the actual debt is being paid off. If you have an interest only mortgage then you will not benefit in any way from the interest being calculated on a daily or monthly basis because you will not be paying off any of the actual loan and therefore the value of the interest on the loan will remain the same. The only way that you can benefit from the interest being calculated on a daily or monthly basis is if you are making payments back on the actual capital borrowed. As you pay back on the actual capital, the amount you have borrowed will gradually decrease and it therefore goes that the daily or monthly interest calculations will be lower and lower.
Annual review interest is a bit of a throw back of the past for mortgages. The lender would look at the size of the debt at the beginning of the year, they would work out what level of interest they were going to charge on it and apply that debit there and then. This meant that for the whole year you were essentially paying of the full years interest. The downside to this is if you repaid some of the debt by lump sum or just standard repayments you got no benefit for it as the interest had already been worked out in advance.
Most lenders up until about 5 years ago used to work out the interest repayments on an annual review basis. They only had to make one calculation a year for each mortgage which would cover the rest of the year. The interest would be paid off no matter how the market fluctuated as the amount due had already been worked out, so there were obvious benefits to the lenders.
Times have changed considerably and nowadays most lenders will now lend money based on the monthly rest method. The market has changed and now customers have come to demand more flexibility from the lending companies. The desire and need of borrowers to be treated more fairly when it comes to borrowing money has created the need for monthly rest mortgages as people came to realise that annual review for those with interest only mortgages did not appear to make very god financial sense.
So look at the mortgage you are going for. If you have interest only and you do not intend to make any capital repayments in the future, it really makes very little difference if you have annual review or monthly rest. However, if the mortgage you think you might be going for is repayment, or if you think that there might be some chance of making a capital payment some time in the future, annual review will be of no benefit to you, and you would be wise to ensure that the method of repayment you have is monthly rest.
Filed under Finance by Chris Clare

