Remortgaging and refinancing in Spain

Very often banks attach conditions to their mortgages, for example your account has to be a "nomina" account, or you need to buy one investment/pension product with them etc. Invariably, they also require you take out their life insurance. I'm guessing the commissions they make out of that warrant the pressure they give their clients.... but it might not be all negative. Bear in mind these 2 points that I personally was not aware before:

Ask your bank if they can include the life insurance cost as a one-off payment and merge it into the refinancing amount. It does not count as an increase of the hipoteca, i.e. it qualifies for subrogacion. (Normally you cannot subrogar and increase the amount, but including periferal costs is ok). Very often this will result in substantial savings too because you are paying ahead of time the whole insurance premium - I had a 60% saving over my existing monthly-payments life insurance.

If you are a couple and the mortgage is to be on both your names, check the weighting of the mortgage amount. Men usually pay much much much higher premiums - we are just made of weaker material obviously! So instead of the obvious 50% of the mortgage payable on the man's death and 50% on the woman's, investigate if the bank can put 75% on the woman because that might save you a decent amount of money.

Next post, we put some numbers out comparing real spanish banks mortgages.