Don’t let Halifax take a loan of you
I’m starting to sound like a broken record with my gripes about Halifax, but if they will keep bombarding my household with junk mail, what else can they expect?
This time it’s a personal loan and, apparently, there’s £13,000 “reserved and waiting” me.
Somehow I don’t think they really have put it aside in a pile with my name on it, but I’ll let that pass.
My real complaint is the interest rate: they are trumpeting the fact that it’s “just” 7.9 per cent.
They seem to be implying 7.9 per cent is some kind of bargain. Hardly.
I can go on the internet and get a loan from Moneyback Bank or Barclaycard at 6.3 per cent.
That may not sound like a huge saving, but if you were repaying £13,000 over five years, it would cost almost £600 more with Halifax.
Bizarrely, by going online I can get a rate of 6.9 per cent from Halifax themselves.
To add insult to injury, they want loan customers to take their repayment insurance.
But the leaflet doesn’t mention how much this might cost.
When I phoned the sales line to ask, I was told it was impossible to say as this was worked out individually.
So I went back online and made some calculations based on examples I found on Moneyfacts.co.uk which use Halifax’s own repayment cover rates.
It looks like it could add about £80 a month to that already inflated loan repayment.
No wonder they’re not keen to advertise the cost, as when I checked the price offered by independent provider Paymentcare.co.uk, it was around £10!
So will I be taking Halifax’s loan and repayment cover? Certainly not, and I hope no-one else does either.
