MSE News: MSE launches free Credit Club

Couple of things:
1. I input inaccurate income information into my Credit Club profile. How can I change it? I can't find any way except to delete my account and create a new account.
2. In common with many providers you ask for details of pre-tax income. How is the tax on that income then calculated? I suspect that I am discriminated against because I am retired, and thanks to careful investment planning, now virtually all of my income is tax-free but I have no way of indicating this. Wouldn't it be better to ask for details of net income after tax?

Had to have a chuckle at the slightly concerned face regarding account length. Have opened a few accounts in the last couple of years - mainly to benefit from rewards, interest rates and cheaper mobile contracts!

Had this been around 2 and a half years ago I'd have had 1 bank account which has been open since 2003, a credit card that has been open since 2008 and my O2 contract was from 2003 until 2015 haha.

MABLE wrote: »

Does not make pleasant reading for me. 737 and fair. Stoozing certainly has taken its toll on my credit report. However it has not stopped BC wanting to increase one of my cards with them by another £2k.

All these statistics all very well but I take all this with a pinch of sea salt.

Similar here - 830 with a "credit hit rate" of 25%. It's so low because of my utilisation (£3k of £20k, paid off every month) and debt to income (< 10%, excluding my mortgage). I'm not entirely sure what it is telling me to do to improve... I've never had trouble getting 0% cards or credit whenever I've wanted though, so it's an interesting analysis.

Isn't this just MSE emulating ClearScore/Equifax?

Will income information for quotes rather than applications be passed to National Hunter and used in application consistency checks?

This is important because it seems that MSE does not use a person's total income in its searches, instead it splits it into pay and other income and attributes the other income to a spouse rather than the individual. That can very substantially understate a person's total income. It seems to make the comparison service here useless for those like me with substantial non-pay income, since it's not representative of the income that would be disclosed in a real application.

The rent is also a little puzzling. The site says I have poor affordability but rent is around 400 a month. Perhaps the site is using the London practice of weekly rents and assuming that the rent is a bit over four times as high as it really is? later, it's specified as monthly on the site Maybe it's also pretending that it has to be paid out of only the pay part of the income?

The possible combined result of these things is way lower projected acceptance than other quotation-based card searches.