How to Choose the Best Lender
If you have decided to take out a loan and have worked out which type of loan will be the best for you, you will then need to think about which lender you should go with. You will have a lot of choice and it can be difficult to know which to choose. It can be tempting to look at the interest rate and just compare them on that. However, this is just part of what you should be looking at.
Cost
Although interest rates will give you some idea of the cost it is wise to look at this much more thoroughly. There will be other costs that you may or may not have to pay that you need to account for as well. Firstly, there may be set up costs for the loan and there may ongoing monthly costs too. You will also find that there will be costs if you miss a repayment and this can vary a lot between lenders. You may feel that you will never have to pay this as you are confident that you will manage the repayments. However, it is worth checking anyway just in case as if lenders are close on other costs then this could be a way of differentiating between them. Another cost to watch out for is an early redemption fee. This is a fee that is charged if you decide to repay the loan early. People will often choose to do this is they have enough money as it is cheaper than repaying the loan over a longer period but if the fee for doing so is too big then this will not be worthwhile.
Reputation
A reputation of a lender is important to some people. If it is something that you are interested in then you will need to do some research. Especially if looking for no credit check loans. It is wise to start by asking family and friends who they would recommend. They have no reason to be biased and will want to help you and so should give you great help with this. If you would rather not talk to them about the fact that you need to borrow money or know that they have not borrowed then you will need another method. It can be wise to then start looking online. There is a lot of biased information though and you will need to therefore look across a lot of websites or find that you trust to be unbiased. When reading reviews make sure that you are clear with what you are looking for in a lender so that if there are negative and positive points you can decide whether these are relevant to you or not, based on your criteria for the perfect lender. Try not to decide on a reputation of a lender without knowing why you have that feeling towards them. For example, you may think a particular one is good but not know why. It could just be that you know the name and that you have seen a lot of advertising for them and it makes you think they are good, when actually without any experience of using them or conversations with people who have used them, you actually have no reason to think that they are good.
Customer service
Customer service can be important to many people. If you need to contact them with any questions or for help with problems then you want to be sure that you can get through to them and that they will be good at helping you. You should be able to check this out for yourself by contacting them with some questions and seeing how fast and efficiently they get back to you. Use the method to contact them that you will feel that you would normally use and send the same questions to each of your prospective lenders so that you can compare them.
Flexibility
It may be important to you to have a lender that is flexible. This could be because you would like to make overpayments sometimes to pay off the debt more quickly, pay less on months where you have less money or that you might want to borrow more money or change to a different loan type. Consider what you might need to do and find out whether the lender will be flexible enough to help you with this. If course, this might not be important to you, it all depends on your personal opinion.
It is also worth thinking about whether there is anything else that is important to you with regards to a lender. You might want one that has a local branch, for example or one that has been going for a long time. Consider what is the most important to you and then make a list so that you can choose the lender that will suit you the best.
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