£2.1 billion to be spent on “renewals” in September

Homeowners will spend over half a million hours in September shopping around for their next mortgage deal, according to new research from Abbey Mortgages. Abbey’s research shows that September is one of the most popular months of the year for mortgage renewals, and approximately 90,000 homeowners are likely to spend on average nearly seven hours (six hours and 54 minutes) each shopping around for the best re-mortgage.

Indeed, it seems many of us still view September as the unofficial start of the year. In the same way we did at school and university, September proves to be a popular month for a variety of annual policy renewals. 3.2 million people plan to renew their road tax, 3 million will renew their car MOT, 2.9 million will renew their car insurance, 2.3 million their home contents insurance and 1.8 million will renew their home buildings insurance.

September could therefore cost us up to £2.1 billion in renewals (see breakdown below), and we’re likely to spend a total of 23.8 million hours renewing policies and re-mortgaging in September alone.

Action Number of people planning to renew in September | Average cost for September | Total September cost of renewals

Renew MOT 3,026,000, £62.40* £188,822,400
Renew car insurance, 2,394,000, £318.20 £761,770,800
Renew road tax 3,247,000, £143.50, £465,944,500

Renew mortgage 88,994, £516.40, £45,956,500
Renew home contents insurance, 2,281,000, £176.90 £403,508,900
Renew buildings insurance, 1,822,000, £176.60, £321,765,200

Total, 12,858,994, £1,394.00, £2,187,768,300

Re-mortgaging tops the table of time-consuming activities, as 6.5 million hours will be spent shopping around for new mortgage deals. Car insurance comes a close second, though, with a total of 4.7 million hours likely to be spent shopping around for quotes.

Nici Audhlam-Gardiner, Head of Mortgages at Abbey, said: “Re-mortgaging might be a time-consuming process, but it’s worth investing the time and effort so that you don’t have to invest too much of your hard earned cash when your current mortgage deal comes to an end. In particular, customers coming to the end of fixed rate deals in the next month will find it hard to match their previous mortgage deal as rates have gone up – meaning good deals become even more important.

“We offer a competitive range of remortgages, with free valuation and legal fees thrown in. We also have fee free products which don’t even charge a booking fee, so making remortgaging a cheap and simple September task with Abbey.”

* Cost of MOT is £50.35, this statistic represents the average amount spent when renewing a car’s MOT, including parts and labour