How much have you saved?

payless

Nigel some big savings there-
although did you really pay £650 for I Cavity wall insulation -

nigel_3

Well I checked up. I paid £748 for cavity wall insulation in 2000. It's a large 4 bed detached house so would be expensive.

Since the installation our gas usage has gone from 710 units/yr (22542KWh) to 470 units (14922KWh), a saving of around about £100pa. OK, so it'll take a while to recoup the cost but it's still a good saving and worth doing if you intend to stay in the same house for a number of years - it's good for the environment too!

Nigel

Martinslovechild

HOW TO GET A LOAN AT 0%

Martin asked me to describe how I managed to accomplish my wife's recent car purchase at ZERO percent (and also swap my own car loan to ZERO percent too !!!), so here it is in all it's glory.

I basically spread the whole balance of the loan across 3 credit cards, all at zero percent. I applied for 3 cards - namely RBS Advanta U (10 months 0%), Marbles (9 months 0%) and MBNA (9 months 0%). They each gave me an approx £7000 credit limit (i.e. a total of £21000).

Marbles sent me some credit card cheques for which there is no admin fee - so the first thing I did was wrote myself a cheque for £7000 and paid it straight into my current account - this is treated exactly the same as a balance transfer, and hey presto, the first £7000 was sitting in my account about a week later and i'm paying 0% on borrowing it !!!. Next up, the MBNA card allows you to balance transfer an amount straight to a current account. Hey presto - another £7000. Last but not least, the RBS Advanta U card which won't let me pay off overdrafts or loans, only other credit cards, but that's where an Egg card comes in handy - I balance transferred £7000 onto Egg which suddenly jumps to £7000 in credit. Next, I did a balance transfer from Egg to my current account (because Egg allows transfers from loans and overdrafts). This might sound a bit weird because what i'm actually doing is using the Balance Transfer process to transfer a credit balance from my Egg card into my current account !! Therefore, the Egg balance goes back down to zero and my current account is another £7000 up !!! Cheeky but effective.

In theory, at this point, there's £21,000 in my current account on which i'm then paying a grand total of 0% on the whole amount and I can now purchase a sporty motor, paying cash for the little beast.

Of course, you've got to pay all this money back . That's why, in practice, my wife decided to go for a maximum spend on a car of £16,500 because this keeps the initial monthly repayments to around the £500 mark. Most credit card lenders now have a minimum payment of around 3%, and by coincidence, 3% of £16,500 is £495.

So, I currently pay £500 per month. This means that the car will be completely paid off after just 33 months. As a comparison, on a loan of £16,500 at a rate of 6.8%, if you paid the same £500 per month, then the first payment would include £93.50 of interest . You would need 37 payments (in other words, 4 extra months !!!) to pay off the entire balance and incur £1,818.87 in interest charges !!!

Because it worked out so well, I got a settlement value for my own car loan taken out some time ago, then paid this off, again after transferring the whole amount to zero percent.

You must obviously move the debt before the expiry of each card deal. You'll need to prepare about a month before the expiry of the 0% rate and sort yourself out with new cards. But after 9 months, £4,500 has already been paid off, so you may only need a couple of cards to cover the remaining balance of £12,000.

As long as there's 0% cards, may the sun shine !!!

P.S. Anybody who knows a car dealer will know that very few will allow you to pay the whole balance on a credit card. However, make sure that you use a cashback card and pay the biggest deposit that you can - I told my dealer that I wanted to pay £1,000 as a deposit on my cashback Visa. He was quite willing, so I bagged 10 quid cashback into the bargain !!! It all helps towards a tank of fuel !!!.

By the way, I calculated my loan saving against an average high street loan rate of 7.9% over 5 years (this was certainly the average rate when I was shopping around). On this basis, the normal monthly payment would have been £333.77. The first payment alone would have incurred £108.63 in interest !!! The total interest paid over the 5 year period would have been £3,526.28.

If you want to check the figures for yourself, load up the 'Loan Amortization' template in Microsoft Excel (File - New - General Templates - Spreadsheet Solutions - Loan Amortization). It will open your eyes.

Taking this to the extreme, there are some people out there who are borrowing thousands on 0% balance transfer, paying 73% of the borrowed amount off their mortgage (providing it's 'flexible'), keeping behind the remaining 27% in a high interest savings account (with some in a Cash Isa - one for you, one for the wife) to pay 9 lots of 3% minimum payments on the cards. At the end of the period, simply transfer the 73% amount back out of the mortgage to pay the remaining credit card balances off. Flexible mortgage deals will happily allow you to do this.

In this example, you could borrow £40,000 on 0% balance transfers and be able to pay nearly £30,000 off the mortgage for a period of 9 months saving £1025 over the period. This calculation is based on a 25 year mortgage at a rate of 4.59%.

Good Luck !!!

mini

Thanks for all the information, I had used my credit card cheques from Tesco to pay for double glazing & a car before they started charging for using them, I wasn't aware that other people were offering them fee free, now what do I need to buy....

thanks

Mini

alanprior

just saved £44 a month thanks to T Mobile threatening to charge £1 a month for itemised billing this is about 1 months mortgage so that can't be bad
thanks martin

Smartasss

alanprior wrote:

thanks martin

Ahem........................................

alanprior

sorry................
thank you smartass
but thanks martin for the site

MSE_Martin

I'll split the praise with you 50/50 smartass

Smartasss

I'd better snatch your hand off, then Martin!

(Especially in view of):

MoneySavingExpert.com asserts copyright on all comments posted on the boards.

System

Hi Martin. I thought you were excellent on BBC 1 the other night on "Hey Big Spender". I have saved approx £53 per year switching my energy supplier via this website. Also, myself and 5 of my friends now have O2 sim cards, ordered via a link on this website, which saves us each about £20 a month.

Thanks for all your great tips.