Best way to get short term cash

[MerryMarigold]

OK, so we have quite a lot of costs coming up this/ next month as we're moving house. Got some money tied up in a bond till end of August, but need to spend a few thousand before that's available. What's the best (ie. cheapest) way to do this?

• Short term loan?
  
• Credit card? (Don't currently have one)
  
• Anything else
  

TIA

[QueenofWhatever]

Im in a similar situation and have just borrowed some cash via a 0% money transfer card. There's a small handling fee, but it seemed the cheapest way of doing it.

Here's the MSE link:

www.moneysavingexpert.com/loans/cut-loan-overdraft-costs

[MerryMarigold]

Thanks queen. Will look into that. Lights, is about 8k. Not sure they stretch overdrafts to that much.

[starfish4]

Queen's suggestion is good. If you haven't finalized your mortgage yet, you could ask for a little more (as I guess you've got a low deal) and when you get your money through in August pay it off the mortgage (even if you have penalties for early payoff, you can still pay 10% off a year).

[QuiteQuietly]

OP doesn't mention buying - she may be moving to another rented property. And if she currently has no credit card, she may struggle to get one with an £8k limit straight away. Probably easier to spread the £8 around several sources (OD/CC/possible flexible loan/interim fundraising such as selling stuff or extra work).

Is there a penalty to cash the bond in now? It may be less than the costs of alternative funding arrangements.

[MerryMarigold]

We are buying but the mortgage is finalised and about to go through next week. We did put a little extra on it (but did not budget enough), so having spoken to dh I think we're looking for 3k now, which is a bit more realistic and may be possible with overdrafts as we already have 2 agreed overdrafts unused and another account which we could wangle an OD on, I should think. Great ideas, thanks everyone. I think the bond has a fairly hefty penalty.

[MerryMarigold]

PS. Dh thinks he's great with money, but MN is even better! I think he'd have done a short term loan, as he wasn't aware of the credit card thing and hadn't thought of OD's.

[Ruhrpott]

We did this, looked into a loan but had to take it out for too long and they wanted over 10% interest on it. We ended up getting a £15000 overdraft and were £8000 overdrawn for a total of about 5 weeks. Think it cost us about £60 in overdraft interest. This was also due to a house move and having two houses for 6 weeks and having to find the 20% deposit for the new house before getting the money from the old house. We got the overdraft with the bank who were giving us our mortgage and they were fully informed of all our finances.