Finance is definitely a mugs game. Been there for that and got stitched up!
Bank loans these days are just so cheap, and like I've said if you play the game you can get them even cheaper, and you can even get around any penalties for paying them off early. In our situation that I mentioned above, the bank manager even told me to go home and do it online as the interest rate was even less than he could offer in the bank. The only clause was a early repayment charge. He then explained that to get around this should we want to pay it off was to pay everything off apart from one month. Then the following month the payment wound go out as usual and the loan would then be cleared with no penalties.
If you're really clever about it you could probably get an interest free credit card and do it that way. Then when the interest free period runs out do a 0% balance transfer on to another 0% card.