The Great Credit File Cleanup

Trajal

Ok so... some of you guys have given me a little advice in recent months which has served me well.

The nasties on my credit file were:

3 defaults
1 arrangement to pay
2 late accounts.

As of today, I have successfully removed the defaults (1 was way out of date, 1 was wrong and the other hadn't followed default procedure correctly and gave up).

Now i'm looking at this arrangement to pay nonsense to see what can be done, as I suspect I will never be able to remove those late accounts, and as they are both 4 years old (all green, with only 3 months of late payments) hopefully not too damaging.

Any advice on this?

I now have additional credit of a £200 capital one card, £600 Very account and £400 littlewoods account, as well as 3 mobile phones.

I'm thinking that the best thing I should do is manage it all well for a year or so and then try for a mainstream credit card.

I also have an HSBC advance account, HSBC old credit card (with 1700 outstanding that I pay off a little each month), an HSBC current account for household bills, an HSBC invest direct facility with 10k credit and an HSBC flexible saver account.

The aim for this is to get a mortgage as soon as my fiancee and I are able to afford a deposit (well she'll be my wife by then I guess!).

Do I need to do anything more to look like a responsible human or am I there and just need to do well with what I'm doing?

Furthermore, will the HSBC invest direct account be working adversly against me in terms of credit to earnings ratio? I don't really use it at the moment as I don't have too much disposable income being the only breadwinner, however I want to start investing again soon as the missus is able to get a job (UK Visa issues)...

Advice please?

izools

Drop two of the mobile phone accounts and one of the catalogue accounts to look like you are responsible but far from overcommitted.

I presume the AP / Late markers are on settled accounts? If they've been settled for a few years that's not too bad - the more recent history on active accounts will be weighted more heavily in credit scoring models.

As you say, maintain the credit card and mobile phone for a year, don't open any new accounts in the mean time and don't apply for credit, and you should be a shoe in for mainstream credit so long as you maintain your payments, keep your balance low, and your other criteria demonstrate stability (time in employment, at bank, at address, salary, etc etc)

Trajal

izools wrote: »

Drop two of the mobile phone accounts and one of the catalogue accounts to look like you are responsible but far from overcommitted.

Err I can't do that. One of the phones is personal, the other is for work (and is paid for by work) whilst the other one is for my partner.

izools wrote: »

I presume the AP / Late markers are on settled accounts? If they've been settled for a few years that's not too bad - the more recent history on active accounts will be weighted more heavily in credit scoring models.

The AP and one late marker is on my HSBC credit card which is an open account - it's still alive with a current balance around £1700 or so. The other late marker is on my HSBC advance account where I went unauthorised overdrawn and took a short while to bring it back up into credit.

izools wrote: »

As you say, maintain the credit card and mobile phone for a year, don't open any new accounts in the mean time and don't apply for credit, and you should be a shoe in for mainstream credit so long as you maintain your payments, keep your balance low, and your other criteria demonstrate stability (time in employment, at bank, at address, salary, etc etc)

Can't really do much for the mobile phones, I shall not apply for anything new in the meantime, just maintain the existing credit properly and keep the balances low. Salary, time in employment, at bank, at address should all be fine already, so in a year will be better than fine.

Thanks for your comments, hope I can hit mainstream credit in April 2012!