the mozo blog

Money lovers, bank spotters and finance paparazzi take note: Mozo is chuffed to present our inaugural People’s Choice Awards.

In the last year, an astonishing 23,938 reviews were cast by you, the real customers, raving about your bank stars and dumping on your money duds. Mozo then crunched the numbers and tallied up the scores, to give voice to the people’s choice.

So who are the home loan heros, the credit celebs and stellar tellars? A round of applause for your winners:

Australia’s Best Bank

ING Direct

Australia’s Best Credit Union

Victoria Teachers Credit Union

Australia’s Best Building Society

The Greater

Sill more coveted awards – including best category performances and runners up – can be ogled at the People’s Choice Awards webpage.

And interestingly, it’s the new talent – the challenger brands and independents – who won your hearts and accounts. More interestingly still (if this kind of thing hits your sweet spot), the people rejected splashy headline rates and flash-in-the-pan intro offers in favour of the best ongoing deals.

For example, UBank – winner of the Best Savings Accounts – doesn’t have the highest rate on the market for its USaver account. However, it does offer an astoundingly competitive ongoing interest rate if you make regular contributions, and is perhaps the best choice for longer-term savers.

So why not get in on a spot of celeb-watching and discover the ultimate line-up of financial products: the best credit cards, home loans, savings accounts, bank accounts, personal loans, term deposits as chosen by the people.

Check out the winners podium at The Mozo People’s Choice Awards 2010.

We reveal some very interesting facts behind the Mozo People’s Choice Awards…

More People’s Choice Awards Information

Check out the winners podium  Mozo People’s Choice Awards 2010

With all of the election buzz, it can be easy to forget some of the key issues, media blunders and budgie smugglers that came up throughout the year. Our eyes gloss over and our brains turn to mush as we are hit with empty promises and rhetoric.

In the same way, the bank earnings season kidnaps our conscious mind. Soaring profits and shareholder returns take precedence, and we begin to forget about some of the biggest rip-offs, disasters and general foul plays that banks have made over the last year.

In true Mozo fashion, we have created a quick 1 minute voting booth – where the community can vote on these real issues and remind the banks that we haven’t forgotten.

Have your say:

As winter dies and the stress of losing weight for summer sets in, spare a thought for credit cards that have gorged for months and are entirely unfit for the christmas binge. Now’s the time to think about a balance transfer.

Since you’re a clever sort, you’ll be ogling those super-slim interest rates on Mozo’s credit card comparison page — and hey, who hasn’t snuck a glance at a lusty 0% balance transfer rate? But here’s the rub: that low interest rate could end up costing you money.

“Zounds,” you might reply, and return to your ogling, but bear with us. We’ve been having a bit of a play with our nifty credit card calculator, which spits out the actual cost of a credit card — in place of all this interest rate and balance transfer malarky. The cost is the total you’ll pay in interest and fees to kill off that debt, and as it happens, it’s the best way to judge a credit card.

So let’s peek beneath the balance transfer covers.

• Citibank’s Clear Card, for example, offers a 0% for 6 months on balance transfers — and a stupendous purchase rate of 11.99% for 12 months. However, if you don’t pay off the transfer within that time, the balance reverts to a corpulent 21.24%.

  For a debt of $3000, with repayments of $200 monthly, you’re looking at a cost of $308 in fees and interest.

• Suncorp’s Clear Options Standard credit card, by contrast, offers 1.9% for 12 months, and then 17.99% on the outstanding balance transferred. Punch in the same numbers, and the cost of knocking off that same debt is only $135.

  The difference is, well, clear.

• St George’s Vertigo credit card has a lousier balance transfer offer still, at 2.99% for 6 months. However, after 6 months any unpaid balance doesn’t revert to a sky-high cash rate, but to a quite lovely purchase rate of 12.49%.

  So what does that all mean? The same debt, with the same repayments, will cost $252 to pay off with St George.

And if, ahem, your repayments drop to only $100 each month, while that debt blows out to $5000, here’s the cost of each balance transfer in fees and interest:

Citibank Clear Card: $4639

SunCorp Clear Options Standard: $2304

St George Vertigo: $1974

The conclusion? Pay of that balance ASAP! But if that isn’t feasible, don’t just grab the best headline rate: it could be twice as expensive.