A LUCKY Tesco shopper managed to nab the “bargain” of their life when they found a pair of kids sports shoes priced at just 4p.

The shockingly low price sent social media into a frenzy with many wondering how shoes were so cheap.

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The pair of B Sports Shoes normally cost £13 but its price had been reduced by more than 99%.

A post of the staggering deal shared on Facebook amassed countless shocked reactions.

The post stated: “Bargain of [my] life, Tesco kids School trainers for 4p, original price £13.00.”

Users were also quick to comment on the extraordinary offer.

One said: “Well done on your bargain!”

But many also shared insight into why the price was so low.

One sharp commenter claimed: “Item at 4p are old stock and meant to be removed from shelves.”

However, another said: “Shouldn’t have been sold.

“It’s meant to be for charity.”

Tesco often reduces prices to 4p on goods that are considered ‘old stock.’

Just last month, a savvy shopper nabbed a two pack of boys long-sleeve shirts for just 4p.

The buyer said: “Found the bargain of the century in Tesco.

“It looks like all the boys long sleeve shirts now come in a pack of 3 (£5.50) however after rummaging through I found a pack of 2 (£3.50).

“When I got to the till I was charged a grand total of just 4p for the 2 pack.

“Looks like it’s old season stock so if you can find this colour packet you might get a bargain too!”

Two years ago, a post Christmas sale of old stock from Tesco saw countless items reduced to the 4p price tag.

A TRAVEL expert has uncovered the secrets of fancy hotel toiletries and revealed why you should never trust them.

Holidaymakers love to horde tiny bottles of high-end shampoos and lotions but you might not be getting what you think you’re paying for.

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Plenty of hotels sign exclusive agreements with luxury cosmetics brands to carry miniature versions of their signature products.

These can add a touch of class to an en suite, but bosses are keen not to give away too much for free.

And, according to travel whizz Jessica Sulima, they don’t.

Writing for Thrillist, she claimed that when it comes to hotel toiletries most of the value is in the name on the bottle.

Jessica said: “These days, it’s rare to find a generic, unheard-of brand lining your bathroom sink or shower caddy.

“As far as luxury hotels go, expect to find D.S. and Durga at The Carlyle, Bamford at The Palace Hotel, or Diptyque at the Ritz-Carlton.

“The trend is a win-win — the hotels get to amplify their prestige, and the cosmetic companies get to spread brand awareness.

“It was probably naive of me, however, to think that such products are exact replicas of what you can find in stores.

“In practice, hotels typically work with these brands to create custom formulations that reasonably approximate their product at scale.

“These samples are designed to be as close to the real deal as possible, and in a perfect world, guests wouldn’t be able to sniff out the substitute.”

Her suspicions were backed up by Anna Ableson, a professor at the Tisch Insitute of Hospitality at NYU.

The industry insider said: “Some hotel toiletries may look like retail name-brand products, but they’re often formulated and sourced differently to meet hospitality industry needs.

“This can cause variations in quality and composition compared to store-bought versions.”

And Ian Ginsburg, president of beauty brand C.O. Bigelow, added: “The north star is to do it exactly as it is.

“But it’s a balance of cost. Sometimes the cost is too much, so we’ll try to modify the fragrance.”

It comes after a Brit who has gone on more than 50 cruises revealed the one item he never leaves home without.

On a beautiful recent fall morning, I was sitting on my porch watching the wind blow through the tree in front of my apartment. The leaves were shaking fiercely on their branches, and every now and then one would succumb, slowly falling to the ground. I was struck by the graceful motion with which they fell and the sense of accompanying peace.

Autumn is such a glorious season, but it’s also a time that’s rich with the symbolism of mortality. And the longer I sat there, the more I thought about how we shy away from talking about or reflecting on death as an inevitable stage of life. It is not an easy topic to confront, especially when there are people in our lives who are seriously ill or grieving a loss. But if we had more courage to broach this taboo topic, I wonder if it could open up an opportunity for us to consider what we might gain by recognising the interwoven state of life and death.

There is a lot happening in the 18th-century painting “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby. Ten people occupy a room lit only by a candle and the glow of a full moon. The group are gathered around a table to observe what happens when a bird trapped in a glass jar is deprived of air.

The onlookers’ responses seem to offer an insight into the ways we approach death when it’s before us. The couple to the left, in the throes of young love, focus only on themselves, as if the consideration of mortality might seem morbid or even unreal. The boy seated beside the couple looks on with rapt curiosity, wondering, as a child would, what happens when something living dies. Of the two gentlemen seated at the table, neither has his gaze on the bird, as if reluctant to contemplate the question of mortality. The young boy at the back glances across to see the fate of the bird, his expression almost sad. To the left of him, a little girl looks up at the bird with both curiosity and fear, clinging to her older sister, who covers her face with her hands while their father calmly points at the air pump, as if trying to draw her attention to what is happening.

The suffering of the bird is something I imagine many of us would turn away from. Yet there is something about acknowledging mortality and the process leading to it that forces us to recognise what a thin threshold lies between life and death. I will never forget the experience of having to put down my beloved dog. We had been together for 11 years, from the time she was eight weeks old. I held her head in my lap and stroked her face as the tears poured down mine. But at the same time, I felt a clear and indescribable sense of relief from my dog. And as painful as it was, it felt an honour to share her last hours, remembering her as a puppy and as a wild, vibrant dog who would tear through the yard before showing up at the kitchen door, panting and exuberant.

I do not have Buddha-like words of wisdom about death. But if we took a minute to imagine where we might insert ourselves into Wright’s painting, it could lead us to surprising trains of thought or offer feelings to explore about where we find ourselves in our own lives. That itself seems to me of value.

In “Sleep and His Half-Brother Death” (1874) by John William Waterhouse, the artist references the Greek mythological story of Hypnos, god of sleep, and Thanatos, god of death, who were twin brothers. A boy dozes on a chaise, his head resting on the shoulder of his brother, who sits shadowed beside him in the dark. In many ancient stories, sleep and death are likened to one another. When we’re asleep, it’s as if we have temporarily left the world; there’s no certainty that any of us will see the dawn. Waterhouse’s painting offers a visceral reminder of that: how easy, it seems to say, for life and death to rest against one another.

And yet, in my experience it can be a challenge to recognise and accept how close we all are to death — something that becomes painfully apparent when we struggle to stay close to someone we know when they lose a loved one or are themselves dealing with looming mortality. I have been in that heartbreaking and heart-expanding situation a few times in my life, when I have felt ill-equipped to walk compassionately with the other person. I wonder if we might be better at supporting one another if we were more practised in sharing our thoughts, beliefs or questions about the end of life.

Recently I was in conversation with the Ghanaian-German artist Zohra Opoku, as part of Berlin Art Week. We were talking about her 2020-22 body of work, “The Myths of Eternal Life”, which she began while receiving treatment for breast cancer in her early forties. Opoku naturally turned to thinking about her own mortality, and was moved by an encounter with ancient Egyptian artefacts at a museum. She began to research the “Spells for Coming Forth by Day” (more commonly known as the Book of the Dead), an ancient collection of spells meant to protect and help those passing from this life to the afterlife.

Many of the works in Opoku’s series have portions of the ancient spells as their title. Her 2023 piece “I am the terror in the storm who guards the great one [in] the conflict. Sharp Knife strikes for me. Ash god provides coolness for me” is an embroidered screen print in which the artist is shown striding forward. Her body, however, is not whole: her head, torso and legs are detached from each other, and the limbs and hands multiplied. It is as if she has come undone from the illness and the treatment it entailed, but the work also speaks in some way to her awareness of the different parts of herself — even parts she may be losing — and her efforts to come to terms with this.

Images of her cupped hands are spread across the top half of the canvas, simultaneously releasing things from her life and receiving new realities. Bare winter trees in the background reference her experience of finding spiritual and emotional succour in nature. It is an artistic representation of a woman celebrating the life she still has while navigating the reality of a sick body over which she has little control. Opoku’s work invites us to consider what it is to be both living and dying at once, a phenomenon heightened by a diagnosis and yet true for all of us every day. When I asked Opoku what had surprised her about her experience of illness, she said it taught her to live with more self-respect, to be more intentional about her art-making and her relationships.

I do not think any of us can fully imagine what our own response might be when faced with the vivid possibility of our own death or that of someone dear to us. But I know that on the occasions when I do confront the prospect of my mortality, I am led to think about how to live now, the state of my relationships, and the value I’m placing on any number of things or experiences. If contemplating our mortality can lead us to stop and ask ourselves if we are content with the way we are living, isn’t it worth the courage to look life and death in the face every now and then?

enuma.okoro@ft.com

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Five minutes before its scheduled departure at 6.16am, the Hokuriku Shinkansen pulls into Tokyo Station — with absolutely no right to look this good so early in the morning. The rising sun, splintered by a hundred office windows, dances on the blue and gold of the train’s arcing, aquiline nose cone. The carriages, gleaming in pearl white and shaped by the man who designed the Ferrari Enzo, come to a millimetre-accurate stop at the platform gates. Doors slide apart to the welcome of soft reclining seats, inviting you to sit down, open a perfect egg sandwich bought on the platform, and enjoy it at 260km/h. 

On Tuesday, Japan will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first bullet train’s inaugural journey. It’s also three decades since my first shinkansen experience but 10 minutes into my trip from Tokyo to Nagano it all still feels a bit like cheating. There’s a nagging sense that I am exploiting the obsessiveness and largesse of a benevolent maniac. Japan, in its glorious, gadgety folly, has decided it must have this extraordinary thing, and it’s joyously ours not to reason why. It really shouldn’t be possible, for less than £42, to travel 200km into the mountains in this style, in a vehicle of this exquisite grace, at this speed, at this smoothness, in a system this supernaturally efficient and with so very little fuss.

The train leaves central Tokyo. Then slips out of its immense suburban splurge with a progression of views that cannot ever tire because of how constantly Japan’s architecture is built, torn down and renewed. Look, and you will always see something new. After Oomiya, in northern Saitama prefecture, the tunnels that make all this straight-line speed possible begin to carve their way into ever longer stretches of mountain. 

For all the external hurtle, the interior is calm. People are talking, but are doing so at a volume calibrated to minimise any bother to other passengers. A young woman in a suit breaks away from her companion to take a mobile call in the corridor. A few years ago, some bullet train operators started talking about the need for “office carriages” so that business passengers could type away on laptops without the appalling din of the keystrokes disturbing neighbours. My coffee barely ripples as the train slices into the darkness of the mountains, and I drift into a traveller’s doze.

I have chosen the short Tokyo to Nagano journey for both practical and emotional reasons. At 8am, I am meeting the manager of a venture capital fund who decided, even before the pandemic made this sort of relocation more common, to swap the throb of Tokyo for mountain air, a long skiing season and the proximity of the world’s finest miso factories.

The shinkansen, playing the facilitating role it does — and always has — for so much of Japan, made his move perfectly reasonable. If he suddenly needs to be 200km away in Tokyo for something urgent, there is reliably a high-speed train every half-hour that will take him there in a little over 70 minutes.

Equally, the shinkansen’s most impressive magic is that my punctual, pre-breakfast skim to Nagano barely feels noteworthy. Japan has gone for an image of nonchalant supremacy in its high-speed trains, and succeeded spectacularly. The 6:16am train is busy, but not crammed, with business folk and foreign tourists. It is mainly populated, though, by that huge hinterland of Japanese conditioned to see high-frequency, high-speed rail as something close to a human right, relishing their station-bought bento boxes and on the move this morning for a million unguessable reasons.

But the other cause for choosing this particular journey to celebrate the anniversary of the bullet train is my own history with it. The Tokyo to Osaka line — the route that launched the concept on the world and crystallised Japan’s sense of its postwar self — opened in 1964, just ahead of the equally nation-defining Olympic Games in Tokyo that same year.

The modern histories of Japan, which I devoured so hungrily as a student in the 1990s, rightly made a very great deal about this pair of events: a powerfully alluring explanatory duo whose shining moment as symbols of Japan’s great postwar resurrection happened, annoyingly, well before I was born. 

But in 1998, now fighting the suspicion that it was squelching irretrievably in the mire of an economic “lost decade”, Japan took another shot at glory: the Winter Olympics in Nagano and, to complete the historic echo, a newly opened bullet train that would eventually connect the capital with the host city. I travelled on this train (at the time only running between Takasaki and Nagano) early that year, eager to ride the newest line and see the preparations for the Games: a participant, at last, in a piece of living Japanese history.

Some 26 years later, this much longer Hokuriku line — now extended into a great sweeping semi-circle that rises from Tokyo up to the Sea of Japan and then along its coast, is still in the news. A new extension, at its far western end, opened this year and adds the town of Tsuruga to the route. Grand plans for the future — and we are talking decades of proposed construction here — will see the route extended still further down to Osaka.

In 1964, the first shinkansen ran at up to 210km/h, on 550km of high-speed track. Today the network has extended to cover almost 3,000km and the fastest train, the long-nosed metallic green Hayabusa, reaches 320km/h.

The long-termedness of the vision, when you look at the current and future shinkansen routes overlaid on a map of Japan’s central island of Honshu, is astonishing. By the middle of the century, according to this blueprint, Japan will effectively have a shinkansen “circle line” running over 1,500km in a mighty loop of high-speed rail: west out of Tokyo to Kyoto and Osaka, north to Nagano and Kanazawa, but eventually joined. 

And it takes something much more than a large budget, cheap debt and fierce ambition to want to do this. In its 60 years of service, the shinkansen has allowed Japan the conviction — often in the face of economic stagnation and decline — that it is fundamentally still a “can do” culture. Tourists may be arriving and using the train in their millions but Japan’s native population is shrinking, ageing and, as the ratio of over-65s nears 30 per cent, becoming less mobile. The geography of its economy is contracting too as the younger population gravitates towards the larger cities and business closures fall heaviest on small rural towns. Logically, these megaprojects should be in decline.

But for all its intensely practical importance as a connector of industrial centres and an arch logistician of human movement, the shinkansen continues to play a role as an ideological encapsulator of Japan’s sense of what it is and what it should ideally strive to be. There has never been a fatal accident. Average annual lateness across the JR Central network is 1.6 minutes. When the natural world forces the shinkansen to stop, you know conditions are genuinely bad.

The shinkansen has achieved that in a couple of important ways. The first is that, despite the appearance of effortless perfection of service, punctuality and performance, Japan knows full well that everything is, in fact, attributable to unstinting effort. It is no coincidence that, in the same year it opened the shinkansen, Japan Railways invented an alarm clock for its staff which could not, under any circumstances, be slept through (thanks to an inflatable balloon under the mattress).

A second key factor is in the remarkable power of the bullet train to geekify almost anyone. Japanese are, by reputation, susceptible to this. But the truth is that we all are, in the face of industrial artistry on this scale. You can legitimately claim not to be interested in the technical details of the Kawasaki Heavy W series train, and may, indeed, not care about its advantages over the E Series. But a first close-up encounter with a shinkansen gliding into Tokyo Station; a first glimpse of Mount Fuji from the window of the Nozomi as the rice fields in the foreground blur; that gentle ear-pop as you fly from a tunnel while buying an ice cream from the snacks trolley — this is how geeks are made.

I am awake again 15 minutes before Nagano, entranced once more by the suddenness with which Japan becomes alpine. We alight to a different temperature, a different smell and, in a true gauge of the distance travelled, a different drinks selection in the vending machines. The shinkansen — more so than any other form of transport and by dint mainly of how stupendously easy Japan has made it to access — is the closest we will ever come to a teleportation machine.

Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief

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In 1976, the then prime minister James Callaghan delivered an uncompromising message to the Labour party conference. “We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending,” he warned. “I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists.”

This passage calling time on the postwar consensus was written by Callaghan’s son-in-law, Peter Jay, who was then economics editor of The Times, a position he’d occupied since 1967. 

In his early days at The Times, Jay, who has died at the age of 87, was a vocal advocate of the devaluation of the pound. He regarded the old sterling exchange rate with the dollar as a “primitive bauble” that Britain ought to surrender if it was to have any hope of improving economic growth. 

After a visit to the US in the early 1970s, he fell under the spell of free-market economists such as Milton Friedman, and subsequently became, along with his great friend the Financial Times columnist Samuel Brittan, one of the leading British proponents of monetarism. He took some credit for helping to precipitate a “kind of fundamental crisis in the assumptions on which economic policy had been up until then largely conducted”.

Peter Jay was born in February 1937 into the bosom of the London Labour intelligentsia. His father Douglas was a journalist, civil servant and politician who served under both Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. His mother, Peggy, was a Labour member of the London County Council, dubbed by a local newspaper the “uncrowned queen of Hampstead”. 

Like his father, Jay was educated at Winchester and Oxford. Academic life was a succession of prizes. “I was one of those people who always found it great fun to compete,” he said. Indeed, such was his success that at Oxford he was pronounced the “cleverest young man in England”, to which his response was: “Is there someone cleverer in Wales?”

While at Oxford he met Margaret Callaghan, whom he married in 1961. They had three children. After graduating, he sat and failed the entrance exam to All Souls before eventually joining the Treasury, largely, he confessed, to get his father “off my back”. 

A chance conversation with a BBC journalist at a New Year’s Eve party in 1966 led to the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, offering him the job of economics editor. He would earn some notoriety there when a bemused subeditor protested that he didn’t understand an article of his. Jay replied: “It’s not intended to be understood by people like you. It’s only intended to be understood by three people, two of whom are in the Treasury and one of whom is in the Bank of England.”

During his period at The Times, Jay also worked as a presenter for London Weekend Television, where he met John Birt, who would later become director-general of the BBC. He and Birt developed an influential critique of the state of current affairs television and what they regarded as its “bias against understanding”. 

In 1977, Jay’s already “sinuous” career took a remarkable turn when — at the instigation of the foreign secretary, David Owen, and not, as many assumed, his father-in-law — he was appointed Britain’s ambassador to the US, despite his relative youth (he was just 40) and his total lack of diplomatic experience. 

His two-year stint in Washington was most notable for the beginning of the end of his marriage, after Margaret had an affair with the journalist Carl Bernstein, an episode later lightly fictionalised by Bernstein’s wife Nora Ephron in her novel Heartburn. Jay, meanwhile, was sleeping with the embassy nanny, who became pregnant. He initially contested paternity of the child she bore but was ultimately shown to be the father. The Jays eventually divorced and he was married a second time, to Emma Thornton, a designer of garden furniture. 

Back in the UK, Jay ricocheted from job to job. He led the consortium that won the independent breakfast television franchise, and in 1986 became chief of staff to the corrupt publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. It was an unforgiving role in which he was “responsible for everything and in charge of nothing”, but he needed the money. Birt came to his rescue in 1990, appointing him economics and business editor of the BBC.

Arriving in Washington, it turned out, had been the high point of his career. “There’s a sense in which, after the embassy, I ceased to have any feeling of a career or a trajectory,” he admitted. “I thereafter thought of all my working activities as a kind of epilogue.”

SEVERAL high street banks have introduced a change to mortgage rules, leading experts to warn borrowers to “act promptly”.

The lenders have shortened the amount of time customers have to lock in a new interest rate ahead of their current deal ending.

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It means homeowners coming off fixed mortgage deals will now need to act with more urgency.

So, if you are a mortgage holder nearing the end of your fixed term, the clock is ticking to negotiate a new offer.

The length of time that a borrower has to secure a new fixed deal is decreasing from six months from the end of their current mortgage to four months.

One by one, major banks have been making the move – with Barclays being the most recent this week.

Here is the full list of banks which have changed their rules:

• Barclays – decreased to three months from September 25
• Halifax – decreasing to four months on a staggered basis from September
• Lloyds – decreasing to four months on a staggered basis from September
• Santander – decreased to four months in June
• Nationwide – decreased to four months in May

Other lenders, such as HSBC, NatWest and Virgin Money still offer customers six months to lock in their new deal.

Nicholas Mendes​​​​, mortgage technical manager at broker John Charcol, said: “This change means that the window of opportunity to secure a new fixed-rate deal at current rates is now shorter.

“Borrowers need to be more proactive and attentive to market conditions to ensure they secure the best possible rates within this reduced time frame.

“It’s advisable for those nearing the end of their current deals or considering a new mortgage to engage with their lenders or seek advice from a mortgage broker promptly.”

An estimated 700,000 loans are up for renewal in the second half of 2024, says industry body UK Finance.

A real concern for borrowers needing to remortgage is how much-fixed rates have risen in the last few years.

The average two-year fixed rate deal has increased from 2.34% in December 2021, to 5.56% as of September 2024.

Meanwhile, the average five-year deal has risen from 2.64% to 5.20%, according to the latest data from Moneyfacts.

The second half of the year has also been marked with repossessions, highlighting the financial struggles many are under right now. 

UK Finance says that 980 homeowner-mortgaged properties were repossessed in the second quarter of 2024.

This is an 8% increase compared to the previous quarter and a 31% uplift in the same quarter in 2023.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There is in fact a positive outlook on the housing market. 

The Bank of England reduced the base rate for the first time since March 2020 in August, dropping the rate from 5.25% to 5%.

As a result, lenders have already started to follow suit and drop their fixed rates.

In fact, Nationwide is leading the way, currently offering a 3.74% home purchase plan deal.

Rachel Springall, finance expert at Moneyfacts Compare, previously told The Sun: “Each lender will have their own processes and timescales for getting applications through, so they can change the window of opportunity from time to time to cope with demand, but also as a reflection on changing interest rates. 

“Interest rates have been falling, so condensing the window can help lenders avoid re-applications. The same window can extend, depending on the situation of the market. 

“Borrowers would be wise to seek out independent advice from a broker to navigate the deals available, but ensure they allow a couple of months to refinance before their current deal ends.”

The move also comes as Barclays announced a reduction in rates by as much as 0.34% for new buyers and those remortgaging. 

Why have banks changed their rules?

The government introduced a new Mortgage Charter in July 2023 to help struggling households.

Lenders who agreed to rules in the Charter were encouraged to raise the amount of time households were given to lock into a new fixed deal to six months.

This was to ensure households had the flexibility to choose a new deal ahead of time and before rates were predicted to shoot up even further.

However, this rule wasn’t compulsory and some lenders already had the policy in place.

Lloyds and Halifax increased the period customers could secure a deal from three to six months in November 2022 – eight months before the mortgage charter.

The group said it has switched to four months because of consumer behaviour and changes in the mortgage markets.

Nationwide and Santander say it’s because mortgage rates are now more stable.

While, Barclays said the move was down to greater stability in the mortgage market, and that over 70% of Barclays customers applying for product transfers did so within the last three months of mortgage terms meaning the extended window was no longer necessary.

What does it mean for customers?

Locking into a new fix deal six months ahead gives homeowners plenty of time to do their research, find the right deal, and plan a budget.

However, if you’re a Lloyds, Halifax, Nationwide, or Santander customer who’s six months away from remortgaging, you’ll now have to wait another two months before you can lock in a deal with your existing provider. Barclays customers will have to wait three.

If you’re looking to lock in a new rate six months in advance, you’ll need to get a quote from another lender.

Although, anyone who has a deal ending soon should speak to a broker to assess their options.

If your mortgage is due to expire in less than four months, the recent changes won’t make your situation any worse or better and you’ll be able to lock in a new deal from this point on.

Either way, borrowers can still check if they can still ditch their deal penalty-free and switch to another provider in case interest rates drop.

In effect, sticking with the same lender becomes an insurance policy for the borrower, as long as they can get out of it.

Different types of mortgages

We break down all you need to know about mortgages and what categories they fall into.

A fixed rate mortgage provides an interest rate that remains the same for an agreed period such as two, five or even 10 years.

Your monthly repayments would remain the same for the whole deal period.

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There are a few different types of variable mortgages and, as the name suggests, the rates can change.

A tracker mortgage sets your rate a certain percentage above or below an external benchmark.

This is usually the Bank of England base rate or a bank may have its figure.

If the base rate rises, so will your mortgage but if it drops then your monthly repayments will be reduced.

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A standard variable rate (SVR) is a default rate offered by banks. You usually revert to this at the end of a fixed deal term, unless you get a new one.

SVRs are generally higher than other types of mortgage, so if you’re on one then you’re likely to be paying more than you need to.

Variable rate mortgages often don’t have exit fees while a fixed rate could do.

How to get the best mortgage deal

If your mortgage deal is nearing the end of its term, you should start to compare rates now and speak to a mortgage broker to assess your options. 

It is then worth speaking with your current lender to see what deal they might be able to offer you. 

Getting the best rates depends entirely on what’s available at any given time.

There are several ways to land the best deal.

Usually the larger the deposit you have the lower the rate you can get.

If you’re remortgaging and your loan-to-value ratio (LTV) has changed, you’ll get access to better rates than before.

Your LTV will go down if your outstanding mortgage is lower and/or your home’s value is higher.

A change to your credit score or a better salary could also help you access better rates.

And if you’re nearing the end of a fixed deal soon it’s worth looking for new deals now.

You can lock in current deals sometimes up to six months before your current deal ends.

Leaving a fixed deal early will usually come with an early exit fee, so you want to avoid this extra cost.

But depending on the cost and how much you could save by switching versus sticking, it could be worth paying to leave the deal – but compare the costs first.

To find the best deal use a mortgage comparison tool to see what’s available.

You can also go to a mortgage broker who can compare a much larger range of deals for you.

Some will charge an extra fee but there are plenty who give advice for free and get paid only on commission from the lender.

You’ll also need to factor in fees for the mortgage, though some have no fees at all.

You can add the fee – sometimes more than £1,000 – to the cost of the mortgage, but be aware that means you’ll pay interest on it and so will cost more in the long term.

You can use a mortgage calculator to see how much you could borrow.

Remember you’ll have to pass the lender’s strict eligibility criteria too, which will include affordability checks and looking at your credit file.

You may also need to provide documents such as utility bills, proof of benefits, your last three month’s payslips, passports and bank statements.

Once you have taken a look at all your different options, you will want to consider the most important aspects. 

These include your current rate, the terms and length and any exit fees, as well as your loan-to-value (LTV).

When your fixed rate ends you will automatically roll on to your lender’s standard variable rate (SVR), and these often are considerably higher than a standard fixed rate.

These can be as high as nearly 8% so switching before the end of your current term is a high priority.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

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