You may have bought your home with a finance company mortgage, or took out a second mortgage to pay for central heating or furniture. Your payments are probably very high because some finance companies charge interest rates of up to 50 per cent. It is advisable that you look carefully at the small print to find the true ratemost mortgage refinancing loans are over a fairly short term, about 15 years at most.

Smaller finance companies and credit brokers have been known to charge as much as 68 percent for interest. You may also find that you were charged a fee for the mortgage when you took it out (which could be 10 per cent of your loan) and that you are also paying interest on this fee. A finance company mortgage can land you in serious trouble, because the monthly costs are often higher than you think at the beginning. In addition, once you start missing your payments, arrears build up very quickly. If you try to pay back the whole loan, you may find that you owe far more than you originally borrowed.

Centralized lenders are finance companies which specialize in mortgages. They sell their loans through agents and they often lend to people who cannot get a loan from other lenders. Their interest rates are often higher. Giving mortgages is not the main business of insurance companies. Many of them will not grant first mortgages at all, or will consider them for only very expensive properties. They lend on endowment and pension mortgages. It is important to work out how much the mortgage will cost and whether you can afford the extra payments, so taking the affordability factor into account is very important.