£42 default on credit rating

mattsday

satchef1 wrote: »

A nice timely thread here. My income is nowhere near as big as the OP's, but I'm in a similar situation. 'Cancelled' a T-Mobile contract when I was 20 before heading off backpacking. Came home 12 months later to find that the contract actually hadn't been cancelled properly and T-Mo had continued to bill me, placing a default on my credit file a month before I got home.


The 'lovely' people at T-Mobile were quite happy to accept payment, but refused to remove the default (apparently it's not possible to do this...). As such, I never paid it off. Now (5 years later) I'm looking at getting a mortgage. I was feeling more than a little worried about the prospect of getting one when there's a default on my record, but this thread gives me some hope

Good luck! Having spoken with my broker about this, she was pretty sure that having the default older than 3 years + settled would have made a positive impact in my application.

She also (correctly) said that going with my bank was the best option if the high street lenders didn't consider me.

anotheruser

So you had just one default (of less than £50) and were declined a mortgage?
That's awful.
I think I might have a default from about 5/6 years ago of about £50, but as I had moved out of the property I had no idea it had been defaulted. I'd be happy to pay it to get a notice of correction but didn't think it would stop me getting a mortgage.

bumblebee2

Matty you got declined for help to buy because of default?

kingstreet

bumblebee2 wrote: »

Matty you got declined for help to buy because of default?

No. The lenders who offer HTB products would not lend to him and his own bank, which is not part of HTB, would.

The HTB part of it was ancillary. The lenders mentioned would not lend to him even if it wasn't an HTB application.

The HCA HomeBuy Agents ask nothing and know nothing about your credit history. You simply need to be able to obtain a mortgage from one of the HTB-aligned lenders.

mattsday

Apparently using HTB they assessed me as a 95% LTV risk, rather than a 75% risk. This meant, in this case, both Halifax and Nationwide were extremely strict.

My broker then looked in to an 85% LTV and these two lenders... Basically they were non-committal and after 2 applications, she said it was best not to bother but instead go via my bank.

I think the key difficulty with HTB is that you're very limited with the lenders on offer and, at least in my case, they applied rather strict criteria. HSBC said it wasn't an issue as the amount was too small for them to care.

Moral of the story: If/when you move, CANCEL or MOVE any and all mobile phone contracts!

kingstreet

I still think Barclays/Woolwich would probably have done this on HTB and if the default had been repaid within three months of registration, so would Leeds BS - for future readers, the latter mention.

For the former - the broker should have tried them first, IMHO. No brainer!