Nationwide turned my down!!!

mustgetclean

I'm currently trying to reduce the amount of debt I have at the moment. In terms of credit cards I have £4k on Barclaycard, £3.5k on Halifax (both 0%) and £6k on MBNA (which is killing me at 19%). I also have a graduate loan of £10k and a car loan of £9k. That said I always make my payments on time, don't miss a payment and often pay a little more than the mimimums (well I do on the stuf that isn't 0%).

As I need to start moving some things around I decided to first get my credit score which I was pleased to see came in at 970, and nothing untoward anywhere in terms of missed payments. With that in mind I was planning on paying off a couple of grand on the MBNA prior to December and shifting the remaining £4k on it to something 0%. As I got a good credit score on my Credit Expert report I thought I wouldn't have problems and went for Nationwide as I don't have any other finance with them and never have. I ran through the application which, aside from contact details, just asked about my other credit card debt and not about how much I was intending to transfer, and got instantly declined. I'm all a bit confused now and don't want to knacker my score by applying for a more cards. Can anyone offer any advise on how I should proceed? Do I just need to accept that they weren't interested for whatever reason and try somewhere else without reading too much in to it?

On a related point, many of my cards have rediculous limits on them that I'll never use (for eample, my MBNA limit is £12k). Will reducing my limits on these cards help or hinder my credit score, or does it make no difference?

Thanks

izools

I would imagine your problem is income to debt ratio.

If you owe much more than 50% of your annual salary most creditors would consider you a high risk - irrespective of how good your payment history is.

Nationwide are known as being especially strict anyway. RBS Group (Natwest, Tesco, etc) might be a better bet as may Egg.

Remember though that the credit score from Experian isn't much help - for a start, it is only their interpretation of your credit file, every creditor has a different score sheet and will weigh each category differently, so your score varies from lender to lender. That, and when you apply for credit, the creditor takes into consideration things like occupation, marital status, residential status, income, time with bank, time at job, etc etc when calculating your score. Experian don't

p00hsticks

I think Nationwide are pretty fussy these days.

They found that a lot of people were only taking out credit cards and/or opening up current accounts with debit cards with them in order to use them on holiday abroad (due to the fact that they didn't charge any fees themselves or - until recently - pass on any of the VISA ones).

That's not really what they want - they want to have customers who use them for everything - so I think they've tightened up their criteria a lot, and unfortunately your profile probably didn't fit in with what they're now looking for. (I suspect that the fact that you haven't any other finance with them and never had has counted against you, for example).

loopy.magic

The first thing you should probably do is confirm that the Nationwide card application left a search on your credit file. It could be that the Nationwide system simply turned you down due to your other debts.

Don't panic just yet, if your credit file and score is good and even if the Nationwide application has left a footprint on your file you may still be able to get a card from someone else.

MarsdenCuckoo

Am no expert by any means but have read other threads on here, where people have confirmed they've been turned down when applying for Nationwide bank accounts so, would seem that Nationwide are pretty keen on who they want as customers.

Equally, MBNA are also tightening up. Do know of someone, who applied for their new Reward account (they already had a different MBNA credit card). Original credit limit was over £17,000 but whilst they were approved for the 2nd card, both limits were reduced to a combined total of £10,000