Borrowers seeking a remortgage or mortgage deal have been put on alert. Interest rates will be rising. While the “when” is still unknown, Bank of England’s external Monetary Policy Committee Member (MPC) Kristin Forbes has warned that it will be “sooner rather than later”. Such news is likely to finally put a fire under all the homeowners and hopeful home buyers that have been waiting out this round of warnings believing that perhaps it wasn’t yet time to see the cheap interest rates leave.

Those that will experience the first wave of interest rates changing are likely to be the homeowners that did not remortgage when their current mortgage deal ended. Having converted to their lender’s standard variable rate (SVR), they will be in danger of facing a quickly changed interest rate level. Most lenders convert their SVR quickly and with little warning. The only safety net against such a situation is to remortgage and grab one of the historically low interest rates currently offered with new deals – most of them with long term fixed rates.

In response to the global economic and major advanced nation’s slowdowns, Ms. Forbes, said, “The news on the international economy has not caused me to adjust my prior expectations that the next move in UK interest rates will be up and that it will occur sooner rather than later.”

Borrowers will currently find that lenders are relaxing their criteria for lending in the hopes of winning the attention of borrowers due to a still competitive lending market. There are also very attractive low interest rates to be found. They won’t last long, for the warnings are growing louder that the interest rates we’ve all grown so accustomed to seeing will soon be history.