MSE News: MSE launches free Credit Club

MSE_Dan_L wrote: »

1. Your ‘Debt ratio’ is about unsecured debt – credit cards, loans, overdrafts, etc. – it looks at the level of debt in relation to your take-home pay.
3. Disposable income – this looks at the money you have left each month after paying committed expenses like your rent and mortgage.

How is your non-pay income included in those calculations? When it's 22% of gross pay soon to rise to 35% and partly tax exempt it's quite a significant number.

It would also be good somewhere to have a display of the actual breakdown and calculations being used to make it easier to check that they bear some relation to reality. It would be nice to know that rent of 400 is [STRIKE]not being taken to be weekly rather than monthly[/STRIKE] later, it's specified as monthly on the site, say, and the breakdown would help to identify such things.

MSE_Dan_L wrote: »

If those numbers don't look right then it might be worth getting a copy of your statutory credit report

Seems more money saving to get the credit report free from a place like Noddle unless it appears to be something specific to Experian.

takman wrote: »

What information do you find too personal? When it is asking you about your financial products it is simply using it to check against information they already hold on you. Your name and address are available on the electoral roll. The only new information you are providing is your salary and number of dependants which doesn't have to be spot on accurate if you don't want it to be.

But this service doesn't offer much at the moment so will only really be worthwhile when they provide free access to your credit report.

When is Experian Creditmatcher not Experian Creditmatcher? When it's MSE Credit Club. The MSE version will be worthwhile if they actually come through with the credit report for free. But as it is I don't see any reason to get both.

Seems a bit hit & miss to me. I accept that this is the information lenders may use to judge whether or not to deal with you but in my case what the basic figures show doesn't really give a very accurate or true picture.

As we (still) have a cashback CC everything that can go on it does, so expenditure not on the CC is relatively low (and in any case is cleared in full every month plus doesn't use that much of the available credit limit). We have no mortgage etc and what I consider a pretty good disposable income yet both debt ratio and affordability are lower than I thought they would be.

Not of any great consequence as I have no plans or need for any financial products, just interested to see how I was rated.

I decided to do this and I can't even sign up. I don't seem to get past stage three and I'm told to review my details. Everything seems correct, the only possibility is that the address history is incorrect. About 7 years ago I moved home and was temporarily living at two addresses but I wasn't on the electoral roll. Is this what they use to determine where I live(d)?

I've tried every combination that I can think of, including the date I moved from the first house to the date I joined the electoral roll. I could put the date I started living solely at my current address but I don't see how they'd know. I've had bills and phone contracts at this address for years, way before I joined the electoral roll.