MONEY WASTERS

Here are some of the worst financial decisions you can make. It may seem obvious but you'd be amazed how many people waste money because they will not take a few simple steps.

With our help you could save thousands of pounds, and we don't charge a fee!

Staying with your existing mortgage provider “because the original home loan was a great deal and they've always been OK with us”

Get real, your bank or building society don't know you from Adam. One of the most surprising things, even in this age of “rate hoppers or rate tarts”, is how many people are so inert when it comes to switching mortgages between providers.

Let’s look at the main reason for doing so: you save lots of money. On a £100,000 loan, where the rate of interest is 6.5%, shifting to a mortgage that charges 4.5% for two years – just two percentage points less – would save you £120 a month off the cost of the mortgage, from about £675 to £555, or more than £2,880 over the term of the new remortgage deal.

There will most likely be arrangement and valuation fees that could reduce that saving down to £2,380. But equally, it is usually possible to find a two-year deal offering free valuations etc.

The important thing is not to think of this as a one-off exercise. If you repeated it 8 times in the course of a 25-year mortgage, you would save at least £19,040 at today’s prices.

Then work out what would happen if that extra £120 were used to pay off more of your loan each month instead of just being handed to your lender as some form of bizarre tribute. You could shave years off the total mortgage period. See our pages on Offset and Current account mortgages.

So if you want to pay less –a lot less – on your mortgage and also pay it off sooner you need to remortgage. Now.

Remortgage Enquiry Form

Money-waster number two.

Not getting new quotes for life insurance. After all, getting older means that your premiums would be higher than before? Not necessarily true. In many cases the cost of life cover could well be less.
There are two main drivers that have forced down the cost of life insurance in the past 10 years:

The “threat” of HIV/Aids is nowhere near as great as it was perceived to be at the end of the 1980s.
We are all living longer anyway, which means there are fewer claims on term life insurance.

The result is that – despite some fears that insurance premiums may have reached their lowest point – the costs are still lower than they were even five years ago.
Indeed, if you factor in both a person’s age and the reduced period for which they are likely to need life cover (compared with the last time they started a policy), even policyholders in their 40s are more than likely to see a significant drop in prices compared to just three years ago.

Also with the new pension Term assurance it is now possible to get life insurance with tax relief on your premiums, saving you 22% at a stroke.

So it’s time to find a better deal on life insurance. And, yes, you guessed it, you can compare prices online with just a few clicks. Compare prices on life insurance via our discounted online system.

 Free Life Insurance Quote