Is a Comparison Website the Best Way to Find a Personal Loan?

There are lots of ways to find a loan and a comparison website tends to be the one that is popular at the moment. There are advantages and disadvantages of using this sort of site though and it is a good idea to think through them both before deciding whether you feel that this method will be the best for you. A few points to consider are discussed below.

Quick and Convenient

It is really quick to find a loan this way. You just find a comparison website and then you can see the loans that they have listed and choose the one that looks the best for you. Generally, they will be compared based on price and so you will be able to find the cheapest and choose that one. You may find that there are several different comparison websites that you choose to use and you will be able to decide which of the loans that they recommend looks the best. This will not take up much of your time and you will soon have a loan in mind and be able to start your application for it.

Needs Little Understanding

You also do not need to have that much of understanding about how the loan works or the terms and conditions as someone has done the comparison for you. You will not have to calculate the cost even and so it will be really easy to be able to decide which to use and you will not have to do this research for yourself. It might seem complex to calculate which will be the cheapest, for example, but actually you can just ask the lenders how much the loans will cost and they will tell you. In fact, this can be a better way to compare them rather than looking at interest rates, which is what most comparison sites use as there may be additional costs as well which are not mentioned on the website.

Limited Amount of Lenders

When you use a comparison website, then they will not compare all lenders. This might be because there are some lenders which do not appear on comparison websites as some will only deal with customers directly. This means that you could be missing out on good deals from these companies that you will never see even if you look at all of the comparison websites that are available.

Commission Based

It is well worth being aware that comparison websites make money from commission. So, if you take out a loan using the link on their site then they will get some commission for that lead. This means that they could potentially be very biased. They might want to make the loans which make them the most money look the best. This could mean that they will purposely not include lenders which do not pay much or do not pay at all and they might try to encourage people to take out the ones that pay them the most money. So, make sure that you are really careful if you are using these sites as you want to make sure you are choosing the best loan for you rather than for them.

So, it can seem like a really easy solution to find the perfect loan using a comparison website but there are limitations and you could find that if you do the research yourself you could end up with a much cheaper loan which will give you better value for money. So, think hard about whether you should be doing some research yourself perhaps alongside using a website like this.