Is it commonly possible to buy an “Option for a Mortgage at a specific Interest Rate”?
"I think the answer to this is just ""no.""  It's not commonly available to have the option to obtain a mortgage at a fixed amount and fixed rate, especially over a timeframe like the 5 yrs you mentioned in your question.  There would be several practical problems with such a thing, including but not limited to: As was noted in a comment to your question, it is common to be able to ""lock"" a rate over a period of days to weeks.  This isn't the same as what you asked though, because it's much shorter term and it's typically tied to having an offer accepted on a specific house."
"It's talked about quite often among more experienced investors. They were/ are used extensively by hedge funds.  Keep in mind that if your option expires when not ""in the money"" you lose the premium you paid for the purchase of the option. That's where the risk comes in.  I've grown really interested in options over the last couple months. Check out McMillan's Guide to Options. It's generally thought of as the quintessential beginners guide to understanding options.  Good luck!" There are banks that will do 5-year fixed. Alternatively, if you pay off a 15-year mortgage as if it were a five-year fixed, with the extra money going to pay down principal, the cost isn't very different and you have more safety buffer. Talk to banks about options, or find a mortgage broker who'd be willing to research this for you. Just to point out an alternative: refinancing at lower rate but without shortening the duration would lower your payments; investing the difference, even quite conservatively, is likely to produce more income than the loan would be costing you at today's rates. This is arguably the safest leveraged investment you'll ever have the opportunity to make. (I compromised: I cut my term from 20 years to 15ish, lowered the interest rate to 3.5ish, and am continuing to let the loaned money sit in my investments and grow.) In most cases an rent with option to buy is structured as follows: The renter/buyer will place a deposit/premium (not the same as a security deposit) that purchases the option( the right ) to buy the home at a future date at a specific price. The renter / buyer will often pay extra rent in addition to market rent.  Many times this additional rent is contracted to be applied to the purchase price of the home. The risks to the renter/buyer are as follows: Also, something to note: Many people will recommend that you use the additional rents to be applied specifically towards the downpayment.  Be wary of this.  There are no institutional lenders available today that will allow the additional rent money to be applied towards your downpayment.  That means you must come up with the downpayment in cash before closing.  The additional rent payments can  be used towards the price.   Hope that helps.  Good luck! Yes.  I've spoken to mortgage officers from various banks who will do conventional loans with anything as low as 3.5% down, however there are many more restrictions (e.g., normally you can borrow funds from a parent or relative for a down payment, in this case that was prohibited). If you are already pre-approved, then your approval letter should state the specifics you need to adhere to.  If you would like to modify that (e.g. put a smaller amount down), then you could still get the loan, but your pre-approval won't be valid. I would recommend speaking with your lender (and perhaps with a few others as well) about the new home you are looking at. I've investigated this, and banks are willing to offer a deal similar to what you ask. You would take out a securities-backed loan, which provides you with the down payment on the property. For the remainder, you take out a regular mortgage.  JAGAnalyst wonders why banks would accept this. Simple: because there's money to be made, both on the securities-backed loan and the mortgage. Both parts of the deal are financially sound from the banks perspective. Now, the 20% number is perhaps a bit low. Having 20% of the value in shares means you'd be able to get a loan for 50% of that, so only a 10% downpayment. Generally, if you watch for the detail in the fine print, and stay away from non-FDIC insured investments, there is little difference, so yes, pick the highest you can get. The offered interest rate is influenced by what the banks are trying to accomplish, and how their current and desired customer base thinks. Some banks have customer bases with very conservative behavior, which will stick with them because they trust them no matter what, so a low interest rate is good enough. The disadvantage for the bank is that such customers prefer brick-and-mortar contact, which is expensive for the bank. Or maybe the bank has already more cash than they need, and has no good way to invest it. Other banks might need more cash flow to be able to get stronger in the mortgage market, and their way of getting that is to offer higher interest rates, so new customers come and invest new money (which the bank in turn can then mortgage out). They also may offer higher rates for online handling only. Overall, there are many different ways to make money as a bank, and they diversify into different niches with other focuses, and that comes with offering quite different interest rates. "It sounds like you are describing ""seller-financed"" mortgages (also sometimes called ""self-financed"", where ""self"" is the seller).  In essence the buyer and seller enter into a legal contract (a promissory note) that specifies the payment schedule, interest rate, etc.  The nature of the agreement is similar to the kind of mortgage agreement you'd get from the bank, but no bank is involved; it's just an agreeement directly between the buyer and seller. If you search for ""seller-financed mortgage"" or ""self-financed mortgage"" you can find a good deal more info about this kind of arrangement.  Here is a useful article from Investopedia, here is one from Forbes, and here is one from Nolo. Broadly speaking, the advantages and disadvantages of seller financing are two sides of the same coin: by doing the agreement yourself without bank involvement, you can cut out procedural red tape, delays, and requirements that a bank might insist on --- but in so doing you may expose yourself to risks that those procedures are designed to shield you from.  Most obviously, as the seller, you receive only the down payment up front (not the entire purchase price, as you would if the buyer got a bank loan), and if the buyer doesn't follow through on the agreement, you're on your own as far as starting foreclosure, etc. You can read up on some of the linked pages for more details about the pros and cons.  In general, as those pages note, seller-financed mortgages are relatively rare.  A home is a big purchase, and if you don't know what you're doing it's easy to screw up in a way that could cost you a large amount of money if things go wrong." You cannot do this as per the reasons mentioned by others above, mainly foreign banks cannot hold mortgages over properties in other countries.  If this was possible to do, don't you think many others would be applying overseas for mortgages and loans. And even if it was possible the overseas bank would give you a comparative rate to compete with the rates already offered in Australia (to compensate with the extra risks). If you cannot afford to purchase a property at record low rates of below 5% in Australia, then you may want to re-think your strategy. "The other answers are talking about seller financing.  There is another type of arrangement that might be described as ""writing your own mortgage,"" where the buyer arranges his (or her) own financing.  Instead of using a bank, a buyer might find his own investor to hold the mortgage for him. An example would be if I were to buy a house that needs fixing up.  I might be able to buy a house for $40,000, but after I fix it up, I believe it will sell for $100,000.  Instead of going through a traditional mortgage bank, I find an investor with cash that agrees the house is a good deal, and we arrange for the investor to provide funds for the purchase of the house on a short-term basis (perhaps interest-only), during which I fix up the house and sell it.  Just like a regular mortgage, the loan is backed by the house itself. I am not recommending this type of arrangement by any means, but this article does a good job of describing how this would work.  It is written by a real-estate guru with lots of training courses and coaching materials that she would like to sell you.  :)" There are few different types of MI you can choose from, they are: Borrower-Paid Monthly (this is what most people think of when they think MI) Borrower-Paid Single Premium (you may have QM issues on this) Lender Paid Single Premium Split Up-front and Monthly The only way to determine which option will ultimately cost you less is to come up with a time estimate or range for how long you anticipate you will hold this mortgage, then look at each option over that time, and see where they fall. To answer your question about the single-premium being added to your loan, this typically does not happen (outside of FHA/VA).  The reason for that is you would now have 90%+ financing and fall into a new pricing bracket, if not being disqualified altogether.  What is far more typical is the use of premium pricing to pay this up-front premium.  Premium pricing is where you take a lender credit in exchange for an elevated rate; it is the exact opposite of paying points to buy down your rate. For example:  say a zero point rate is 4.25%, and you have monthly MI of say .8%.  Your effective rate would be 5.05%.  It may be possible to use premium pricing at an elevated rate of say 4.75% to pay your MI up front--now your effective rate is the note rate of 4.75%.  This is how a single premium can save you money.  Keep in mind though, the 4.75% will be your rate for the life of the loan, and in the other scenario, once the MI drops off, the effective rate will go back down from 5.05% to 4.25%.  This is why it is critical to know your estimated length of financing. "The ""pure play"" would be using interest rate options.  http://www.cboe.com/Products/InterestRateOptionsSpecs.aspx" "I think the closest you can come is to buy health insurance, which had the company's bet on trends in healthcare costs already built into it. But as you've posed the question, I agree that the answer is ""no"" -- at best you might find someone willing to give you short odds that the rate increases over 20% or long odds that it doesn't go up at all, or something of that sort... and that isn't a bet the markets are designed to handle." The short term bond fund, which you are pretty certain to have as an option, functions in this capacity.  Its return will be low, but positive, in all but the most dramatic of rising rate scenarios. I recall a year in the 90's when rates rose enough that the bond fund return was zero or very slightly negative. It's not likely that you'd have access to simple money market or cash option. Mortgage rates generally consist of two factors: The risk premium is relatively constant for a particular individual / house combination, so most of the changes in your mortgage rate will be associated with changes in the price of money in the world economy at large. Interest rates in the overall economy are usually tied to an interest rate called the Federal Funds rate. The Federal Reserve manipulates the federal funds rate by buying and/or selling bonds until the rate is something they like. So you can usually expect your interest rate to rise or fall depending on the policies of the Federal Reserve. You can predict this in a couple of ways: The way they have described their plans recently indicates that will keep interest rates low for an extended period of time - probably through 2014 or so - and they hope to keep inflation around 2%. Unless inflation is significantly more than 2% between now and then, they are extremely unlikely to change that plan. As such, you should probably not expect mortgage interest rates in general to change more than infinitesimally small amounts until 2014ish. Worry more about your credit score. Interesting thing is not all of this analysis is typically done by the person you are speaking with re: your mortgage.  Likely there is an economic team (at some institution or another, as many many loans are sold/distributed in some fashion), finance team, and all of them are looking at various rates etc.  Typically what is offered is matching an offsetting liability somewhere else.  So there may be cases where the spread someone is looking to pick up might be tighter or looser within institutions or types of institutions vs others, even though the overall market is at one place.  (e.g. banks vs. insurance companies).    So you may have negotiating room at a certain term, but not another, or the reverse at another firm.  One firm might have lots of 10 year money, while another might be limited, so will be picky in what they choose.  Either more conservative loan terms/ltv, or a higher spread, for example.  So many things go into the ultimate rate someone can get, but in theory the blog did a decent job.