Credit score and a 4.5x income mortgage?

rosieposey1972

Hello, this is my first post here but i have been lurking and reading for a couple of years Please forgive me if this is a bit rambley but i really need some advice on credit scoring and mortgages.

My DH has recently (6 weeks ago) taken out a remortgage with Woolwich. We are very happy with it, the rate is excellent and it has enabled us to pay off all outstanding debt on his credit cards (which came to about £8000). We didnt check his credit rating before applying (we did this through a mortgage broker) and the application sailed through. Our mortgage broker said he must have had an excellent credit score.

We have been thinking about moving for a while but we were going to wait a couple of years however our dd and ds go to school in a nearby village and we very much want to move there. The perfect house for us has just come on the market and we want to sell ours and buy that one.

It would mean taking out a mortgage 4.5 times DH's income which we think is do-able because we have no other debt, we will save at least £200 per month in petrol going back and forth for school pickups to this village and it still leaves us a pretty decent disposable income.

The only thing we are wondering about is DH's credit rating. We checked it yesterday and it was only 'fair' the actual score was 738 and it said this was because he had £8000 worth of outstanding debt on his credit cards - of course we know this has been paid off now and DH phoned mastercard last night who said it takes quite a while to show and the only way to change that is to send off a statement to Experian and have it amended that way.

Does anyone know if we should wait (its probably going to take at least a month or more for that to happen) before trying to get a 'decision in principle' for his score to go up given that we are looking for a little bit more than the average or if its possible that he will probably get a yes on a 'fair' credit score.

Our house will (hopefully) sell very quickly - the other ones in our street stay on the market for less than a month. Hence why before we market our house we would like to know that we can at least get a mortgage for the other one (we know how much the vendor is looking for as the estate agent gave us a pretty good idea).

DH just doesnt want to ruin his credit score by getting turned down - obviously it will go up (although i dont know by how much) when the credit card bill is shown as paid but its a few weeks off that and we would like to put our house on the market but wont unless we are pretty convinced that he will get another mortgage (most likely from the woolwich because of exit fees) Our broker said he doesnt really see a problem as they are one of the lenders that will lend a bit more but i suppose we are just stressing about his credit score - i dont think it has gone down since he made the last application which was successful as our circumstances havent changed but as we didnt see what his credit score was 6 weeks ago we dont know for sure.

Is it possible to get a higher mortgage with a fair credit score? We would have 20 percent equity in the new house as its another 60 k more expensive than the one we are in.

iheartbristol

My OH and I are buying. We did a simple 'how much can I borrow', put in all my debt figures etc, completely honest and it gave 4.5 x salary as the total we could borrow. Then we had the Mortgage Decision/Agreement in principle done and it only offered 3.8 times salary (lucky we only wanted 2.6x anyway).

Show's that even if a mortgage looks affordable on a 'how much can I borrow' the DIP can come back with something else altogether. I would wait for his experian report to be fixed if it was me, but I can see your dilema