Best savings accounts?

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Sure. If your idea of saving is losing money.

Its not "losing money" though, its a degradation of spending power in relative terms.

People so often grossly simplify things like this to get bullet points for headlines and then they get misquoted and misrepresented of the facts, then it becomes "general knowledge" that if inflation is greater than interest rate your losing money.

E.g Basically housing prices are static, if your saving at 3% interest to purchase a house then your ARE gaining on the relative spending power of your money each year.
If your saving money to spend on stuff like electricity, petrol, food then yes you are potentially losing spending power as your 3% may be exceeded by the inflation ON THOSE PRODUCTS.

My understanding of these alternate borrowing/lending schemes is you have to wait till its repaid (or not), you cannot just go in and demand your money back (some may allow you to sell to another lender, I am not sure). Some may pool debts and borrowings maybe? But the ones I have seen you lend to specific borrowers in small amounts to many borrowers spreading your risk, and wait as the cash is repaid. In effect you wait until the very end to get your interest as its only once you have had the whole of the original loan repaid that you can consider you have made any interest.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Examples :

http://www.beaconfinancialtraining....hold-back-mortgage-overpayment-money-678.html

http://www.creditchoices.co.uk/mortgages/guides/mortgage-overpayment-guide.html

Extract from above "Access
If you are making overpayments, you are effectively locking your money into your house and thus losing the ability to spend it if you need to in the future.

Some mortgages have flexible features which allow you to overpay and borrow back without penalties, so you can put extra money into your house, but also withdraw it if you need to. If you are in this situation, you might as well put all your spare cash into your mortgage and use it like a savings account.

However, if your mortgage doesn’t have a withdrawal facility, it would definitely be advisable to set up an emergency fund before making overpayments. This fund would ideally contain enough money to live on for six months or so, in case you lost your job or other aspects of your life changed dramatically. Once this fund is set-up, you are covered for an emergency and can then spend any disposable household income on overpayments."

 

[FreeStream]

If you price to sell then in my experience you can exchange and complete in 4 weeks.

Hah.

Not a chance. Recent experience of a mate was 100% cash + freehold = 8 weeks.

Might find a buyer in 4 weeks, won't do everything in 4. His lawyer said even the swiftest of cases are 6 weeks+.

As for the OPs question, I agree with Fox. Selling a house just because you weren't smart enough to have a decent period of savings is dumb.

 

[Tachyon]

Just someone who has read through lots and lots of mortgage terms and conditions Something most people do not even do when signing up for their own mortgage.

The vast majority do not allow an automatic draw down of anything overpaid, you would have to apply to do so, and thats the jist, the time your most likely to want it is when they are most likely to say no (ie being made redundant).

If you have a flexible mortgage, (often one that allows you to automatically move property and maintain the same mortgage) then you are usually entitled to draw back any overpayments to take you back to the position as if you had never made them.

Like with everything one size does not fit all and one product will not be identicle to every other, but by far the most common mortgages terms do not allow automatic drawdown of overpayments.

Got a genuine lol from me there, I thought you were maybe someone in the media or something that wrote articles on managing finance, couldn't believe it when I seen your name beside the reply. Just hadn't noticed your name previously, that's why I hadn't a clue who you were, I think it's because your username is an actual name, I wasn't suspecting another forum member.

Anyway, interesting to hear not all mortgages allow that as it's something I found very beneficial when we'd a mortgage and it's something I would definitely look at should I ever take another mortgage out again. At the time I was telling folks I thought it was a great idea and they should consider doing it, however I can see if they weren't able to access their money why it mightn't be so appealing.