Little did he know, that phone call would seal his fate for the next two decades. So when Northern Rock asked Greg over the phone if he was happy with his mortgage one year on, he didn’t consider leaving them. The terms of Helen and Greg’s mortgage meant that the interest rate on the loan would skyrocket if they remortgaged to another lender. This would be unheard of in today’s market, where even 100% mortgages are few and far between – but things were very different before the 2008 financial crash. ‘They’d lend you 125% of the property value, but £30,000 of it was an unsecured loan, not part of the mortgage.’ ‘It’s very expensive to become an airline pilot,’ he told us. Greg says the loan was mostly put towards his pilot training.

It included a £30,000 unsecured loan on top of a mortgage for 95% of the property’s value. The deal Helen and Greg took out from Northern Rock was called a ‘Together’ loan. There are thought to be more than 150,000 mortgage prisoners in the UK, many of whom could be at risk of losing their homes. This means that mortgage prisoners are often paying thousands of pounds more than they should be every year. The longer you are trapped with a mortgage, the more likely it is you’ll have been moved onto the lender’s standard variable rate – an interest rate that is much higher than you’d be able to get with a new deal. A mortgage prisoner is someone who is stuck with a mortgage that they can’t get out of by remortgaging (switching to another mortgage or another lender), or who has an interest-only deal and no way of paying back the loan.

Nightmare on trap street