Nationwide BS soft search and personal loans

Animaldrummer

All,

I'd really appreciate some advice, ahead of clicking send on a personal loan application.

I am a Nationwide Building Society current account holder and have access to their soft search personal loan quote system. I have a total of around 25k in debt across the board and want to try and consolidate some of that with another unsecured personal loan. My objective is to pay off credit cards that have hit their full APR rate (24% average). I'm applying for £14,000 which is all going toward consolidating debts, so my overall debt won't increase in total. I use creditexpert which shows that my current debt represents 73% of my 'available credit'. I have no missed payments or accounts in arrears, have lived at the same property for a number of years and my credit rating sits squarely within 'fair'.

Long story but getting there...

The nationwide soft search system is returning an average APR of 13.4%. But before I commit to a full application I wondered whether anyone has any experience of how accurate this actually turns out to be. Clearly I am reticent to go firm on an application if it declines me and impacts upon future applications. So what do you think about that level of APR? I know the soft search has an automatic cut off of 24.4% which guarantees a fail, but anyone been through it at nearer the 13% level and survived?

I really would be grateful for some help.

Regards - David

TheWanderer77

I know this isn't really what you are asking but, I did this recently with Nationwide for a credit card (I have a current account and an ISA with them), they were offering 17 months interest free for balance transfers so I wanted to transfer the £900 from my Cahoot card. I did the soft search and it said they could offer me the card with 13.9% APR, the interest was to a certain extent irrelevant though as I wouldn't incur any.

I went through with the application and they declined me. I have a near perfect credit score with Experian (966) but I do have a default, the default is 3 years old and was paid off in full, but the default was for a credit card, this will be why they declined me.

I am pretty sure Nationwide have very strict lending criteria so the fact your score is in the 'fair' category might impact your application, but as with most credit applications it's hit and miss.

Good luck though if you choose to go through with it.