Advantages: Mutual society means cashback, excelletn customer care Disadvantages: Savings and mortgage rates are a bit average
Britannia is a mutual buildingsociety, with branches in most towns.
I have both a mortgage and a savings account with them and have been in several branches near where I live recently, for one reason and another, so I thought I'd tell you all about it!
THE MUTUAL BUILDINGSOCIETY
What this means is that Britannia are not a PLC, and beholden to their shareholders, they are a society owned by the members. so when they make a profit, they distribute a portion of that as fairly as possible to all the members. The way they have devised is a loyalty scheme, whereby once you've been a member for two years (with either a mortgage, a savings account, a credit card etc) you get your share of the profits via a points scheme. The more points you have, the more profit you get, up to a maximum of £500 a year. You accumulate points by having ...
Advantages: Good personal service and good rates Disadvantages: No branch in my hometown of Walsall
About four years ago I received the annual statement from Sun Life Assurance regarding my mortgage endowment and, being an accountant, I did a few calculations to see roughly what the final figure would be at the end of the term. I was horrified by what appeared to be quite a shortfall in endowment to mortgage outstanding!
Since the returns from the policy were not going to be enough to pay off the mortgage at the end of the term I had a choice to either take out a further policy or change my mortgage. I decided to change my mortgage from an endowment mortgage to a repayment mortgage. I shopped around and found that the best deal would be with the BritanniaBuildingSociety, as they would give me a discounted interest rate whilst I remained a member of my trade union, Unison.
I have also continued paying my policy with Sun Life ...
Advantages: Good selection of financial products Disadvantages: If your requesting a transfer don't expect it to be easy
As a loyal Portman BuildingSociety Customer I was a little sceptical as to what to expect when they were bought out by Nationwide BuildingSociety.
Nationwide claim they are "Proud to be different", and they certainly are. Although they supply a large number of high interest savings accounts, fixed rate ISA's at a whopping 6.15 percent and great value deals on mortgages I noticed a couple of downfalls as well.
With specialised savings accounts customers are normally issued a passbook to track their investment records. Nationwide's Passbook is dark blue in complexion with the Nationwide logo emblazoned on the front in gold. The pages inside in my opinion are not of very good quality especially compared to the offerings of the Yorkshire BuildingSociety and Britannia. In a passbook I like to be able to clearly see my transactions ...
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