BR 6 years on, our story!

roxy84 · 24 April 2014 at 11:14AM

Hi, so I like reading how people have got on since going BR so here is a quick look at how the whole thing has gone for us! Hopefully I won't waffle on to much.

Back in 2003 when I was 19 and my now husband was 24 we bought our first home together, it was a nice 2 bed flat in a converted Victorian building but it needed updating, we got a Northern Rock 110% mortgage I think we paid £85k for the flat, we both had relatively good jobs working full time. In 2005 we sold our flat for £115k, we paid off the mortgage part but not the extra loan, and used the equity to put down on our new house which was £172k a 3 bed detached in a nice area. It was all going well for a couple of years, we had a nice car 'on finance', a nice house, my husband was earning £50k a year offshore and in 2006 we unexpectedly had our first child, with the cost of childcare against my wage it wasn't worth me going back to work and we didn't have any family around us to help out, I was 23 by this time. We were ok for a while but then work started to dry up he went to Norway for a while but then he got laid off and we started to fall behind with a few payments, started to use credit for every day expenses and eventually we had our car repossessed, bailiffs were coming knocking for various things, my husband got another job at home but was earning much less around £28k, and to cut a long story short we were in a serious mess.
In the end we both had a few CCJ's between us, various debts we couldn't afford to pay, I was now pregnant with our 2nd child and eventually we got summons for a charging order to be put on our home, we took financial advice and were both advised to go BR before this charging order could be enforced so in 2008 at 7 months pregnant I went BR and a month later my husband did to.

It all seemed so easy at first, that was it all our troubles were gone no more bailiffs knocking on our doors and we could finally get to sleep at night without worrying about what the next day would bring. The judge at my BR couldn't believe we were advised and allowed not to pay off our northern rock loan, and our OR was ok we didn't have to make any payments, we were both automatically discharged a year later.

We had our 2 children and managed to stay in our home, it was in negative equity and we changed our mortgage to interest only to give ourselves some breathing space. We purchased back our share from the OR the the £1 plus fees. These 6 years haven't been the easiest, we have had to learn that we can't just have what we want and have had to only get what we can pay for with our own funds, we haven't been able to get a lot of normal things people take for granted like current accounts, mobile phones etc and have been severely restricted into who we can go with for normal household things like car/house insurance etc and have had to pay a premium for these. We cleared our credit files and did all the things advised of us on here, we tried building our credit rating up but were declined for everything, I know some people have been able to open proper bank account and get credit builder cards but for us that wasn't the case, we didn't want anything in particular but everything was a 'Decline' for us! My husband was unable to get a business account for work, and had to go witch 'cashplus' in the end

In 2011 my husband went back offshore as work started to pick up again, he is now trading as a limited company and earning £70k a year so we have been fortunate to be able to save up for the treats in life such as holidays, we have done work to our home to improve it and have money saved in the bank, and have not needed any credit to do any of the things we wanted.
In 2012 we got married and managed to pay for the whole thing ourselves without any help from anyone else or with the use of any credit!

Yes a lot of people may see it as a 'cop out' including members of our own families who gave us a hard time over it for many years, but at the time we didn't see an end to our debt and were advised that for us that was the best way to go, of course it was our own fault in the first place for getting ourselves in that position and we have no one else to blame for it, it has been a hard lesson to learn and being at a very young age were caught up in having nice things in life and quite frankly credit was thrown at us everywhere we went and we should of but didn't know any better!

Both our BR's are now off our credit files, we have at last 6 years after the day been able to get 'normal' current accounts, mine is with halifax and my husbands Nationwide. We both have mainstream 15 month 0% credit cards, with credit limits of £2000 & £7000, of course we are not intending to use these for any big purchases we simply have them to hopefully increase our credit scores, incidentally my husbands score was 999 on experian all through his BR so as said before on here take no notice of these scores as they mean absolutely nothing.
I am now 29 and we are expecting baby number 3 at the end of this year and hopefully looking at buying a larger property next year all being well, we are continuing to save up for any unexpected situations and have started saving up for a house deposit so fingers crossed!

Sorry for going on, that must be the longest 'essay' post I have ever written!
I would like to say a thank you to anyone on here who helped us back in the day with our form filling and guided us through the whole process, and I wish anyone just starting on their journey all the luck in the world with everything