Don’t be baffled by the best-buy tables

The banks have been up to their usual tricks to entice unsuspecting punters to their headline-grabbing interest rates. Merryn Somerset Webb reports.

If you are anything like the rest of the UK population, you probably spend a reasonable amount of time thinking about your house, your mortgage and whether you can afford another of either of them. Particularly given that so many others apparently can (the latest Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors' survey shows the highest level of housing transactions since March 2010).

You probably also look at the mortgage best-buy tables every so often, and think that loans look pretty affordable. After all, if you can borrow hundreds of thousands of pounds at 2.5%, what can go wrong?

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.