When thinking of buying a house, whether for the first time or the fifth, the first thing you need to arrange is a mortgage. A very popular type of mortgage is the repayment mortgage, this is because the mortgage is set for a specific period.
The term of which you can decide, for example 25 years and the monthly repayments are a fixed amount and you know at the end of that period you will not owe a penny.
Usually a lender will offer an initial low fixed interest rate for say the first three years and then it changes to another fixed interest rate for the next 22 years, which makes budgeting for your mortgage very easy.
The downside to this type of mortgage is that the mortgage period will never be shorter than the initial set period. Also if the banks base rate drops exceptionally low within the 25 years, you will not benefit from this.
The initial low fixed interest rate of say three years also ties you to that mortgage, which is not a problem unless you want to move within that time and arrange a new mortgage. If this is at all likely it is best to get a mortgage without this initial fixed rate, as it can be very costly with the penalty charges involved.
In these circumstances you also would not have benefited from paying off any of your mortgage amount as in the initial years of the mortgage your monthly repayments are paying towards the interest owed alone and not towards the mortgage amount.