Additional Mortgage Draw-Down – Remarkably Quick and Easy

Until now I’ve mostly been funding the build from savings, the result of having sold my previous house in 2014. I did draw down the minimum mortgage allowed by the Ecology Building Society – £30,000 – in order to “activate” the mortgage when the build started, but the plan has always been to spend (most of) my savings first, to cut down on the mortgage interest.

With a few large bills on the horizon and my savings running out fast I thought it was time to test the process for drawing down additional mortgage funds. I can borrow most of what I need against the value of the land, which means I don’t need to worry about getting frequent updated valuations as the building work progresses – I’ll only need to do that once, when I’ve borrowed 90% of the value of the land (by which time the house will be worth enough to cover the remainder of the borrowing).

I knew the process wouldn’t be too difficult but I was pleasantly surprised at just how smoothly it went. The steps were:

  1. Download the “Release of Retention Form” from the Ecology website
  2. Enter most of the details in Microsoft Word, print, sign and scan the completed form
  3. Email the completed form to the Ecology mortgage team
  4. Wait for the team to process the request, submit the Faster Payment to my bank account and then email confirmation back to me
  5. Confirm the money has arrived in my bank account
  6. Receive a letter in the post the next morning confirming the new total borrowing and the increased repayments

The most impressive part was that it only took an hour between emailing the form and having a substantial sum of money arrive in my bank account.