MSE Credit Club Registration - Income

EachPenny · 17 May 2017 at 12:48PM

I just wanted to provide some feedback on the Credit Club registration process and warn people of an issue they might come across.

When filling in the registration form, the field for "Annual pre-tax income" (work, pensions, benefits) requires a minimum of £1000, it won't allow you to proceed with a lower figure.

So if you have work, pensions or benefits income below £1000 you either have to lie

or are not allowed to join the club

I hope MSE aren't really intending to exclude people who for example stay at home to look after children or elderly relatives, or people who have retired early and don't get their pension yet. That would be so unfair.

Bearing in mind the site warns "Be accurate and consistent when entering your income. Lenders may verify this, and if it's wrong, you may be auto-declined." it is important for people to accurately enter their income and still be able to complete the registration process.

Hopefully MSE will be able to fix this 'bug'. In the meantime it would be useful to know how the income figure is actually used by MSE and/or Experian so we know if entering £1000 in the income field as a work-around is going to cause problems later.

RG2015 · 17 May 2017 at 1:29PM

I had the exact same problem and am glad that you have brought up this issue.

My wife is a "Homemaker" and does not have any official income so falls into this category. The main reason for joining was to be aware of any identity fraud rather than applying for credit. Nevertheless it did not stop her getting a 999 Experian score.

However she has a very generous benefactor also known as her husband who will testify that her annual income is actually well above the minimum figure of £1,000

Candyapple · 17 May 2017 at 1:36PM

I thought they only asked for it so they can work out your 'Affordability score' aka MSE's version of pointless info.

Also, isn't there an option to input 'household income'? I know I get asked to update/check my income details everytime I log in and this question is definitely on there so if you were a stay at home mum you could put your partner's income down in this box.

EachPenny · 17 May 2017 at 1:42PM

RG2015 wrote: »

However she has a very generous benefactor also known as her husband who will testify that her annual income is actually well above the minimum figure of £1,000

Lucky her

I think that would need to go in the 'Additional income' box, the same with savings and investments.

You could have a total income of 10's of thousands of pounds, yet not be allowed to join the club :huh: or at least not unless you are willing to mis-describe your income. Even rich people like to apply for credit sometimes

EachPenny · 17 May 2017 at 1:48PM

Candyapple wrote: »

I thought they only asked for it so they can work out your 'Affordability score' aka MSE's version of pointless info.

I assume that's the case, but if they pass the data to Experian it might end up in your file... thinking of the hiccup with letters being sent out by mistake :doh:

Candyapple wrote: »

Also, isn't there an option to input 'household income'? I know I get asked to update/check my income details everytime I log in and this question is definitely on there so if you were a stay at home mum you could put your partner's income down in this box.

There's an 'additional income' field which is where a lot of people will be able to put in lots of income, but unfortunately it doesn't matter because you cannot proceed until you put at least £1000 in the work/benefits/pension field.

EachPenny · 19 May 2017 at 9:30AM

Would it be possible for someone from MSE to have a look at this and comment please?

MSE_Dan_L · 19 May 2017 at 2:06PM

Hi all

We've checked this out and looked into this with Experian who provided us with the requirements for this field.

The main reason for this being set as a minimum of £1,000 is to try to avoid errors with potential typos which might be made. For instance someone entering an income of £30,000 but perhaps missing out a zero.

This is a common setting across Experian and so its systems don't currently accept any figures beneath this amount. We've spoken to it about the possibility of this being changed and different validation being used to avoid the typo issue, however we've been told that this would require significantly development work.

For the moment, I'm afraid that the minumum entry will need to remain as £1,000, so if your income is less than this, then it is best for the moment to include your salary as £1,000.

We'll continue to keep an eye on this and it may go into the stack of future developments to enhance Credit Club.

I hope this helps.

MSE_Dan_L · 19 May 2017 at 2:08PM

EachPenny wrote: »

I assume that's the case, but if they pass the data to Experian it might end up in your file

I can assure you that no figures which you provide to Credit Club will be appended onto your credit file. Your credit file only looks at historic credit information and doesn't include any information at all about your salary or savings.

I hope this helps to clear that point up.

EachPenny · 19 May 2017 at 6:11PM

MSE_Dan_L wrote: »

I can assure you that no figures which you provide to Credit Club will be appended onto your credit file. Your credit file only looks at historic credit information and doesn't include any information at all about your salary or savings.

Thanks for that assurance Dan. I wasn't really concerned about a false income figure being added to a credit file, it was more the other potential places where it may be recorded and used.

There is also a risk of members thinking they might be eligible for a product if the product's minimum income requirement is just under £1000, or else if the provider is only accepting customers with regular employment income, no matter how little. The thread currently running about TSB declining someone for a credit card is a case in point - if being employed is a requirement then saying you have employment type income of at least £1000 might lead to false hope.

Hopefully Experian will soon be able to provide a more sensible error trap in the form of a pop-up window asking for confirmation of a figure which looks too low (or high!) rather than requiring users to input false values.

Many thanks for looking in to this though.

MSE Credit Club Registration - Income

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