Credit searches for AIPs

Pupnik

Hi,

We had our offer accepted and an AIP from Abbey/ Santander. Our AIP was for 40k at 25 years, but they have since said they would only give us 37k at 35 years - so we would be paying around £100 a month which is ridiculously low (only 10% overpayment) They said if they had evidence of 3 years of bonuses they could stretch to 40k. We provided this evidence, and they have now said they would go to 38k with a draw down of £750 (?!?!?!) This has been going on for a few weeks now so I am sick of them, it doesn't bode well for a future relationship!

I would like to approach NatWest but I am really concerned about making another mortgage application within a month - will this affect our credit rating? It isn't great to begin with as we buy everything in cash and have no credit cards, loans, products on finance etc (no defaults or anything like that either)

Is there is alist of what banks do soft searches? The worst thing would be to apply to NatWest, get rejected because we already applied for a mortgage recently, then be forced to go back to Santander and their ridiculous 35 year mortgage and get rejected at another credit search if they see we applied for NatWest.

Also, are any AIPs actually worth the paper they are printed on anymore? We easily got accepted for a 50k mortgage last year through Coventry (sadly that product now has large fees) and nothing has really changed since then (apart from the deposit getting bigger!)

We have a 50k deposit, house is 90k. Combined income is iffy as OH is on around £15k and I am around £24k but self employed for less than a year so we can't use my income to base our borrowing on.

Thanks in advance

GMS

Why not go with Santander and overpay as much as allowed. Once you have 2/3 years of self employed income then look to refinance elsewhere or add yourself to the mortgage and reduce term.

Seem slike your options are restricted at present so maybe look to take what you can in the short term with a longer term plan in place.

Pupnik

I don't really feel like I can trust them to keep their offer on the table for the duration of the sale, everything about them so far has seemed so flakey it just feels like they are likely to change their lending criteria at any moment and we might find ourselves having paid for surveys with no mortgage.