Top 7 Tips for Choosing an Online Loan Site

How do you select the best loan offering out of thousands? Borrowing for a business, home or car is a serious financial commitment for most to make and you are likely to want to make it with someone reliable. This is more than possible to accomplish online. You won't get a customary smile and hand-shake and you may even miss out on the free T-shirt; but you do get lots of choices and plenty of online data you can use to make your decision. There are many online loan sites which are highly reputable and provide the best services a customer could hope for, but there are others that will trick you with hidden costs that may not become evident until later.

1. When going out mortgage shopping on the Internet, make a shortlist of the various loan rates, features and reliability you want from your list of lenders.
   
   
2. Perform a search on your favorite search engines to spy out what kind and how many negative articles and reviews have been written about the company's online loan practices. For example, you could perform a Google search for “Company Name Review” or “Company Name Review Negative” and see what turns up.
   
   
3. Investigate the reputation and credibility of the company web site by performing a directory lookup or check an online map to confirm their physical address.
   
   

4. Examine the lenders track record. A check through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) web site at http://www.ftc.gov may give you a good idea about how worthy your lender is.

   
   
   
5. Apart from the FTC, you could also confirm if the lender's web site has been reviewed by TrustE. If TrustE approves of the company web site, the home page of the online loan site will carry a familiar TrustE seal.
   
   
6. Make sure the site you consider submitting your loan application to is secure. The additional 's' in 'https' indicates the use of a secure protocol. Most sites that ask customers to submit personal information use the Secure Sockets Layer to encrypt the data submitted. PayPal is one example of a site using SSL.
   
   

7. When you log on to any online loan site to submit your loan application, look at the address field of your browser and notice if the company name appears in the domain name like: http://www.companyname.com. If the URL supplied to you resembles something like [http://www.domainname.com/loans/companyname], you may want to double check the identity.

Mort Sloan writes, whines and occasionally pontificates for Eloan Review, a database of online loan providers which are rated and reviewed by editors as well as site visitors.