The feature of a flexible mortgage from which they derive their name is the ability to accelerate or slow down your repayments to suit your lifestyle. This means that you can take actions such as depositing your annual bonus into your mortgage account to reduce your mortgage debt, or take a payment holiday if you have to go on maternity leave, for instance.

This aspect of mortgage products has been given broad appeal by changing employment patterns that now seem to favour short-term contracts and performance-related pay, as opposed to the steady 'job for life' ethos that prevailed in previous decades. People are now much more inclined to take career breaks and almost half of all UK workers now take home a variable amount of income each month. Many millions of workers are also now getting some form of an annual bonus.

Flexible mortgages do not constrain people in such situations to paying a fixed amount each month, thereby allowing them to maximise or minimise their mortgage contributions depending on their circumstances at the time.

Flexible mortgages may seem like a new phenomenon. In a way they are, but some of the features that contribute to a mortgage being called flexible have been around for years. What is new, is that recently these features have started to be combined into specific mortgages, which are then packaged and marketed very much as lifestyle products.

They originated in Australia and first appeared on these shores in mid 1990's, but by the start of 2002, there were over 70 lenders offering flexible mortgages of one form or another, the majority of which are either high street or direct lenders. Flexible mortgages now account for somewhere around a third of all new mortgage business.

As well as growing in terms of the number of lenders offering such lifestyle products, flexibility has also broadened in terms of their effect on other types of mortgage. While 'true' flexible mortgages are almost always found with variable rates, some features of flexible mortgages can increasingly be found with other mortgages. This is particularly the case with tracker mortgages and increasingly so with discounted mortgages and even non-conforming mortgages such as mortgages for those with an impaired credit history, buy to let investors and so on. All of this means that while lifestyle flexible mortgages have established themselves as a mortgage category in their own right, certain flexible features have now found their way into mainstream products and changed the whole face of the mortgage market.