What's your advice on rising interest rates and mortgage repayments?

A The trouble with trying to predict what will happen to interest rates is that you can't. However, I would be tempted to stick with your current deal. This is partly because you say that you can afford a pretty big hike in interest rates before your variable rate would start to stretch you. And partly because if interest rates continue to not go up, as they have for quite a while now, you would kick yourself if you took a fixed-rate deal and ended up paying 2%-2.5% more in interest every month as a result. If you want to hedge your bets against future interest rate rises I suggest overpaying your mortgage to reduce the amount of the loan on which interest is charged.