Way back in the Nineties, I took out a ten-year fixed-rate home loan with my existing mortgage lender.
I’d already had two special-rate deals with the same lender when I began searching the market for yet another low-rate deal. Naturally, I wasn’t keen to pay my lender’s standard variable rate (SVR), because this was the highest rate it charged to borrowers, so I was shopping around carefully. Fortunately, I spotted that my mortgage lender had a Best Buy ten-year fixed-rate loan available to new customers, so I sweet-talked it into giving me the same deal. (That’s sweet-talked as in: “Give me this rate or I’ll take my home loan to one of your rivals”!)…