Make sure you use your paper £10 notes before 1st March!

There are just a few days to go before around 211 million paper £10 notes featuring Charles Darwin cease to become legal tender. That’s enough cash to pay off more than 14,000 mortgages of £150,000 each!Put end to end, that’s enough notes to retrace almost half of Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle. The notes weigh the same as nearly two thousand giant Galápagos tortoises that Darwin saw on his travels. If you’ve got any paper tenners sitting around, you’ve got until Thursday 1st March to use them. Most retailers will no longer accept the paper £10 note as payment after this date, although some banks and building societies may continue to accept them for a while at their own discretion. The Bank of England however, will continue to exchange Darwin £10 notes indefinitely after 1st March.How many tenners could YOU save?The value of paper £10s in circulation is around £2,109 million. Although this is a huge amount, it’s still less than the savings UK mortgage holders who are currently paying their lender’s standard variable rate (SVR) could save by switching to a better deal.Our research last year found that a whopping £2.78 billion is wasted each year by 1.1 million homeowners sitting on the wrong mortgage deal. Switching away from the SVR to a better deal can save homeowners an average of £216 each month or over £2,500 annually, equivalent to 250 of the shiny new, Jane Austen polymer tenners that are replacing the Darwin notes. Yet despite these substantial savings 3.4 million households didn’t know the current interest rate of their mortgage, highlighting just how many people could be paying over the odds. So, if you haven’t reviewed your mortgage for a while, check your rate now and see how many tenners you might be able to save by switching.