Tips and tricks for getting your loan lender to play your game.
In any business arrangement there are two opposing motivating forces: the buyer wants to pay as little as possible for the goods or service, and the seller wants to maximise his profits. The idea of bartering is so entrenched in many cultures that it seems almost impolite to pay the asking price. Yet someone who was asking for a hundred pounds for something will quite often accept seventy, and still make a healthy profit. The reason? Because they want to maximise their profits but know that there will always be someone round the corner who will undercut them if they keep their prices too high.
So when were shopping around for a loan, are we in a position to haggle? Generally speaking, no. The rates at which loans are put on the market are the result of boardroom calculations, shareholder expectations, base interest rates and many other factors. But what you can do, and what a surprisingly small number of borrowers do, is take your business elsewhere. Nowadays, the better deals arent round the corner, theyre simply on a different website. Anyone with a few minutes to spare can not only examine a...