The best deals if you must have a mortgage

With the average property now 9.6 times the average salary and the credit crunch making it much harder to borrow, now is not the best of times to be getting a mortgage. However, there is one quirk in the market that's worth exploiting.

The average UK property now costs a staggering 9.6 times the average salary, says the FT, which means that many of those who have bought a house in recent years are sitting on monster mortgages. Thousands are in for a nasty shock if they have to remortgage before Christmas as lenders pass on the five interest-rate rises since August 2006. Worse still, the recent credit crunch has seen a swathe of the more attractive mortgage products whipped off the shelves by lenders.

Moneyfacts.co.uk reports that the total number of mortgage products available has fallen by 40% over the last three months, with a drop of 16%, even for customers with good credit ratings. It's also becoming harder to borrow, with a 60% rise in the number of rejections in the past six months. As a result, the best deals are being snapped up faster than discounted Wedgwood at a Harrods sale for example, the latest Dunfermline 5.29% two-year fixed deal sold out after only four days.

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.