Finance Choices
Cahoot Flexible Loan
Cahoot - Flexible Loans
Cahoot were one of the UK's first strictly online banks offering a unique service to their bank account holders, access to their accounts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and from anywhere in the world. Owned by Abbey National the large high street building society they have quickly become the leaders in consumer finance, offering savings accounts, motor, travel and home insurance. Cahoot also offer an excellent range of personal loans, allowing customers to borrow as little or as much as they like.
Cahoot offer two types of personal loan:
Fixed Rate Loans - allowing you to borrow between £1,000 and £25,000, over a period which best suits your budget, the typical loan period is between one and seven years. Learn more about cahoot fixed rate loans.
Flexible Loans - a flexible loan allows you to borrow as little or as much as you need, and pay back the loan as you feel.
What is a Flexible Loan?
Think of a credit card and how it works:
You apply for a credit card with Cahoot, Cahoot will then send you your card and advise you of your limit. Allowing you to borrow £5 up to £5,000, its up to you. You then pay the credit card monthly, paying the at least the minimum amount which cahoot requests.
Now think about a flexible loan, it has the same principal but no card. You ask Cahoot for a £10,000 loan, Cahoot then make the funds available to you and allow you to borrow what you need. You then pay interest only on what you borrow, so if you borrow £5,000 of the allocated £10,000 then you will only pay interest on the £5,000 you actually borrowed.
A flexible loan can be great if you are using it to say build an extension, you know its going to cost between seven and ten thousand pounds so to be sure you had enough funds traditionally you would have to take out the top line £10,000. With a Cahoot flexible loan you can request the £10,000 limit and borrow as much as you need.
Apply for your flexible loan here
Cahoot were one of the UK's first strictly online banks offering a unique service to their bank account holders, access to their accounts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and from anywhere in the world. Owned by Abbey National the large high street building society they have quickly become the leaders in consumer finance, offering savings accounts, motor, travel and home insurance. Cahoot also offer an excellent range of personal loans, allowing customers to borrow as little or as much as they like.
Cahoot offer two types of personal loan:
Fixed Rate Loans - allowing you to borrow between £1,000 and £25,000, over a period which best suits your budget, the typical loan period is between one and seven years. Learn more about cahoot fixed rate loans.
Flexible Loans - a flexible loan allows you to borrow as little or as much as you need, and pay back the loan as you feel.
What is a Flexible Loan?
Think of a credit card and how it works:
You apply for a credit card with Cahoot, Cahoot will then send you your card and advise you of your limit. Allowing you to borrow £5 up to £5,000, its up to you. You then pay the credit card monthly, paying the at least the minimum amount which cahoot requests.
Now think about a flexible loan, it has the same principal but no card. You ask Cahoot for a £10,000 loan, Cahoot then make the funds available to you and allow you to borrow what you need. You then pay interest only on what you borrow, so if you borrow £5,000 of the allocated £10,000 then you will only pay interest on the £5,000 you actually borrowed.
A flexible loan can be great if you are using it to say build an extension, you know its going to cost between seven and ten thousand pounds so to be sure you had enough funds traditionally you would have to take out the top line £10,000. With a Cahoot flexible loan you can request the £10,000 limit and borrow as much as you need.
Apply for your flexible loan here
posted by Barbara Gordon at 2:21 PM
Cahoot Flexible Loan
10 Comments:
Having taken early retirement I neded a way to consolidate my remaining debts (credit/store cards) and reduce my monthly outgoings - and after a lot of research on the net I found Cahoot to be very easy and fast to deal with. Although there were a number of options open to me I chose a fixed rate loan so that I could plan my future expenditure. I also like the advantage of on-line control. Once I had worked out which product I needed from the options available I was able to use their loan calculator to see how much I could borrow. (And being 'retired' at less than 60 years old was not a problem, unlike some of their competitors) .Recommended to all.
Cahoot Online have competitive rates. They use secure remote access. but the slow responce times are an issue.
Cahoot On line offers a fully flexible loan with a highly competitive intereset rate. Pay what you like, when you like. Borrow it back later. Online statements and payments make keeping track of it a doddle. Only downside is that once you have taken out the account your rate will not fall if base rates do - but can go up if they rise.
I choose Cahoot's flexible loan because of the advertised rate and flexible repayment options. It is unsecured, the interest is calculated daily and there are no early repayment penalties.
Setting Up
----------
Applying online is easy, you need a secure connection, you fill in your personal details, income, bank account details, etc and how much you wish to borrow. They then tell you if you have been accepted or not. The application takes about half an hour. A credit agreement gets sent to you in the post and you have to read and sign it and send it back along with proof of your address.
All this takes about a week then the loan is ready for withdrawals. You then login to your account on their website where you can transfer money to your bank account. This is supposed to take at least four working days if your current account is not with Cahoot, mine only took three days. You can also use your online account to look at statements, change repayments, etc. You do not pay any interest until you withdraw money so it just sits there until you need it. It says in the small print that they can close your account after a year of inactivity either before you start using it or after it has been paid back.
I don't know how fussy they are about credit records, I have only ever had a couple of credit cards and they accepted me. They might not accept people with bad credit though.
Repaying
--------
I choose a limit of £5000 and was offered a rate of 8%. I ended up only using £4000 of it but the other £1000 is still available to me if I need it. You can apply to increase your limit at a later date if you wish. It kind of works like a credit card, where you have a direct debit which takes the minimum amount of £50 or 1.75% (whichever is higher) from your bank account once a month. You can choose which day it is debited so you can have it coming off the day after you get paid, for example.
You have a number of repayment options:
â?¢ Pay only the minimum amount each month. Doing it this way will mean it will take years to pay the loan off .
â?¢ Arrange (online) for a higher regular repayment. There is a calculator on the website where you can specify how long you want the term to be and it tells you the monthly repayment amount. If you find that this amount is too low/high you can change it at any time.
â?¢ Pay the minimum amount each month and make extra 'lump sum' repayments.
The latter is my preferred option because it is the most flexible as the amount I can afford to re-pay changes every month. The only problem with this option is that you can't make 'one-off' repayments online, you have to do it via your current account. This isn't too much of a hassle for me because I regularly use telephone banking but if you had to go into your branch this would be a real pain. It takes four working days to transfer the money from a non-Cahoot current account to your loan.
Customer Service
----------------
Before I applied for the loan I sent them an email asking for a couple of written quotations and asking a few questions, their response was prompt, answering the questions by email the following day and sending the quotations in the post.
I also had to phone them up because I forgot my password, they were quite helpful and said they after they couldn't do anything until they had received my signed credit agreement (which was in the post) but I should phone back in a couple of days and they would send out a form for me to fill in. I didn't have to phone back though because I remembered it the next day. Doh!
Summary
-------
I am very pleased with my loan, I'm confident that it is a really good deal and I like being in control of my repayments. I think it's great that you can still withdraw money even after you have start ed repaying because you never know when you might need it.
I choose Cahoot's flexible loan because of the advertised rate and flexible repayment options. It is unsecured, the interest is calculated daily and there are no early repayment penalties.
Some time ago, I got out a flexible loan with Cahoot. While the interest rate was pretty steep, I had the facility to pay in more at the beginning of the month, and siphon off money as I needed it. It would also allow me to reborrow when I needed to make the final payment on my car (done last October... yay! ). I could also pay in any overtime.
The problem is that occasionally, I found that the loan had been frozen (i.e. I couldn't withdraw against it). When I enquired the first time, they said that it was merely a mistake on their part, and that my direct debit was in the process of being made. The second time it happened they said the same, promising that it would never happen again.
The third time it happened, I was pretty annoyed. The bank advisor said that this was caused because the direct debit from HSBC hadn't gone through in time. After enquiring, he said that there was nothing that could be done about it. I am not impressed, when I think I am paying a premium interest rate for the flexibility of the loan.
Needless to say, I am leaving Cahoot for a loan on a much more competitive rate!
Has anyone else had any problems like this? I find it hard to believe that HSBC is causing the problem - none of my other direct debits seem to be causing a problem.
Ta.
MM
MM
Sounds like you are trying to use the cahoot loan as a type of 'offset' account.
It probably isn't geared up to do this and by 'flexible' they probably thought most customers would make 1 or two overpayments and withdrawls a year - not per month.
I think you might be better off with a 'best buy loan' and a high interest savings account or current account so you are making the most of both your savings, borrowings and current account funds but without actively having to switch funds at different stages of the month.
This approach also avoids 'lost' interest for the 3 days that transfers are in transit between your different accounts.
Babs
Great work!
[url=http://oevwkxit.com/gjcq/qdgf.html]My homepage[/url] | [url=http://uktbrrjs.com/pqph/bpnc.html]Cool site[/url]
Good design!
My homepage | Please visit
Thank you!
http://oevwkxit.com/gjcq/qdgf.html | http://wvkkyknc.com/deiq/dkkc.html
Post a Comment
<< Home