The five best financial Spring Cleaners on the market

1. Best balance transfer card

0% balance transfer cards are fantastic tools if you’re carrying debt on a credit card.
Right now, the best balance transfer card is probably the Lloyds TSB Platinum MasterCard. If you transfer your credit card to this card, you won’t have to pay any interest for 21 months!. What’s more, the balance transfer fee is exceptionally low at 1.5%. (As long as you apply by March 23rd.)
Granted, there are several cards that offer longer 0% periods, but they all charge significantly higher balance transfer fees than the Lloyds card.
So, for example, the Barclaycard 25 Mth Platinum Visa card offers a 25-month 0% period, but you’ll to pay a 2.9% balance transfer fee when you make the transfer.
So if you had a £4000 debt, you’d have to pay a £60 fee to transfer the debt to the Lloyds card, whereas you’d have to pay a £116 fee to transfer the debt to the 25-month Barclaycard.

  
2. Best 0% purchases card
The Tesco Clubcard Credit Card for Balance Transfers is our favourite 0% new purchases card.
So if you got one of these cards and then made a big purchase, you wouldn’t have to pay any interest on the resulting debt for 16 months. What’s more, you can also earn Clubcard points on all your spending with the card. You’ll get five points for every £4 spent at Tesco, and 1 point for every £4 spent elsewhere.
There is one card available with a slightly longer 0% period – the Halifax Purchase Credit Card MasterCard which comes with a 17-month interest-free period for purchases.
In our opinion, the Tesco card beats the Halifax card because the Clubcard points offer is so attractive.
Just remember that the 0% period for new purchases always starts when you take out the card, not when you make the purchase.

3. Best savings option

Getting a decent return on your savings is getting harder and harder, so your best bet may well be to lend out your savings via a peer-to-peer savings site. These sites enable you to lend to other businesses or individuals and you can get a higher return than anything offered by the vast majority of savings accounts.
Right now, we think the RateSetter.com 3 Year Income option is especially attractive. You’ll get a fixed return of 4.4% a year, and you’ll also get protection from Ratesetter’s ‘Provision Fund.’ This means that if you lend to someone who is unable to repay his loan, you’ll probably be able to get compensation from the Provision Fund.
You should note that if there are a large number of claims against the fund, then there might not be enough money left in the fund to compensate your loss. What’s more, Ratesetter isn’t protected by the government’s FSCS scheme.
However, there have been no problems with Ratesetter so far, and plenty of savers are getting a great return from lending via the site.

4. Best mortgage

With interest rates so low, you can get some fantastic mortgage deals at the moment. Chelsea Building Society’s 2-year fixed deal is arguably the best. For the first two years you have the mortgage, you’ll only have to pay 1.74% in annual interest. That’s an astonishingly low rate. However, the fee is on the high side at £1825, and you won’t be able to borrow more than 60% of the value of the property.
If you don’t have such a large deposit – or ‘equity’ in your home – Nottingham Building Society has a great deal. Once again, it’s a 2-year fixed mortgage and the interest rate is 2.79%. Crucially you can borrow up to 80% of the value of the property.