The EBS Building Society is the latest lender to set up an Internet Website, located at http://www.ebs.ie which provides information about home purchasing, savings and investments and other services.

This site is quite large and anyone thinking about buying a new house in particular should give themselves plenty of time to trawl through the various headings. Especially useful is a repayment calculator into which you key in your own requirements about the type of loan you want to borrow, the amount, duration and interest rate.

Up-to-date interest rates, including fixed ones, can also be accessed and by playing around with the figures you can work out the monthly repayment cost.

For example, if you want to borrow £70,000 over 20 years at the EBS current variable rate of 7.3 per cent APR the monthly repayment will be £546.92. However, if you decide you would like to pay off the loan in 18 years, the same repayment rises to £574.95. What the Website calculator can not tell - EBS take note - is the overall savings you enjoy by reducing the mortgage term by two years: £7,071.60.

For someone more interested in finding a home for their cash, rather than cash for a home, the EBS Website details its range of deposit accounts and savings and investment plans. You simply key in the amount you have available, the length of time you are prepared to put it away and a range of options appears which you can investigate further. The quality and extent of information of financial Websites like this one varies a great deal: some are more comprehensive than others; some are more interactive or user-friendly than others. But what makes them all useful is that they provide the consumer with information that will help them ask the right questions when they finally go to borrow for a mortgage or choose a savings product. A full comparison of all mortgage lending rates is available on the REA Mortgage Services website at http://www.rea.ie REA Mortgage Services an independent, fee-based mortgage advisers.