New market-leading 4.6% loan from Santander
The personal loan market is heating up again with a new best buy from Santander which is only around for a limited time.
Santander is offering a market-leading rate of 4.6% on loans of between £7,500 and £15,000 as part of a flash sale.
This is the cheapest rate available on loans of this size, but it will only be around until midnight on Wednesday 4th December.
Borrowers taking out a loan of £10,000 at this rate for five years can expect to pay back a total of £11,187.60 or £186.46 per month.
Personal loan changes
The bank has confirmed it will be reducing rates across a number of other loans in the coming weeks.
Competition in the personal loan market is fierce and rates have fallen steadily in the past year.
Clydesdale Bank and Yorkshire Bank have also lowered the rate of interest on their loans of between £7,500 and £15,000 to 4.9% this week.
There isn’t a great deal of difference among providers but here I’ve listed the top five cheapest loans.
|
Loan |
Representative APR |
Total amount repayable (TAR) |
|
Santander Personal Loan |
4.6% (until 4th December) |
£11,187.60 |
|
HSBC Personal Loan* |
4.8% |
£11,239.80 |
|
4.8% |
£11,239.80 |
|
|
4.9% |
£11,266.20 |
|
|
Yorkshire Bank Online Personal Loan |
4.9% |
£11,266.20 |
*must hold a current account
Competition in the loan market
In the past year providers have slashed the rates of personal loans in an effort to secure more customers and remain at the top of the tables.
At the start of the year changes were occurring almost every week, but now the trend appears to be lowering a loan rate for a limited time. Sainsbury’s started this at the start of November when it dropped rates across a number of loans for a couple of weeks.
This means borrowers are forced into acting quickly before the rate is taken away. Providers can therefore apply pressure on people to sign up, but don’t have to commit to lowering their rates permanently.
The interest rate advertised will also not be available to everyone, even if you are successful with your application. Lenders are only obliged to offer the advertised rate to 51% of successful applicants.
Compare personal loans with lovemoney.com
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Comments
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I can understand Santander's approach to this, as it's just before the big Xmas spending spree, especially as I received in the post this morning letters from both RBS & Barclaycard, trying to market (a.k.a. 'push) to me, credit cards, to cover the cost of my expenditure over Xmas. The RBS one included the 0% purchases for 15 months and better than that, a balance transfer fee of 0.9%. Barclaycard's balance transfer was 2.9%. Not interested in either, so did my bit for the environment and I recycled. Anyone else doing more recycling with this method these days??? Even better though, is that as I've earned my salary over the past 12 months, I've set funds aside ready for this time of the year, [B][I]because I knew it was going to happen!![/B][/I] and I budgeted for just that reason..... Therefore, 'The cheapest loan EVER' per the title of this piece, is actually the one you make to yourself (albeit I accept it isn't really a 'loan', but you save yourself taking out one and paying back more than you've spent) by thinking ahead and being wise with your money so you don't [B]have[/B] to borrow. The only time I do, is if I'm making a much bigger purchase at say perhaps £10,000+ where such an amount could be a challenge to save over 12 months! Naturally, the other cheapest loan, is the one I make to my children, so that aside from them using their pocket money, if they need to get their Mother that something 'extra', I'll sub them and not ask for anything back....unless its a bar of chocolate (must be 200g or more tho'!!) ha ha.
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30 November 2013