Advice please.

Matt-H_5

Just found out that for the last 10 months one of my direct debits has been cancelled. GE-Money have contacted me at my new address tellin me that I owe £380.66 in missed payments for the last 10 months on a consumer finance arrangment. Paid them off same day as the letter dropped through the door.
I moved bank accounts last august and a+l were meant to port all of my dd's across to the new account as part of the move. This one was missed. My old account was closed around 2 months after.
Received my experian report today and it is great apart from this one entry. 6665432100
Whats the best way of repairing this? Mortgage is uo for renewal this year and dont want to get stung with a rubbish rate.
Is it best to settle the loan or should i just pay it as usual each month to try and bring back the 000's on my credit score.
Please help.
Thanks in advance.

Mindspace

Hi,

I'm not able to make sense of 6665432100? Dont know what that does mean!

Prob...Post will help as a bump!

pinkkat8910

The numbers represent activity for the last 12 months on the account.

The higher the number the more defaults i think - so the first 6 means there have been 6 consectutive defaults i think??

pinkkat8910

The aim is to have all 0's .... ie. no defaults

(sorry pressed post too soon lol)

pinkkat8910

Matt-H wrote: »

Just found out that for the last 10 months one of my direct debits has been cancelled. GE-Money have contacted me at my new address tellin me that I owe £380.66 in missed payments for the last 10 months on a consumer finance arrangment. Paid them off same day as the letter dropped through the door.
I moved bank accounts last august and a+l were meant to port all of my dd's across to the new account as part of the move. This one was missed. My old account was closed around 2 months after.
Received my experian report today and it is great apart from this one entry. 6665432100
Whats the best way of repairing this? Mortgage is uo for renewal this year and dont want to get stung with a rubbish rate.
Is it best to settle the loan or should i just pay it as usual each month to try and bring back the 000's on my credit score.
Please help.
Thanks in advance.

Hi Matt,

Sounds like you've had a nightmare with A & L.

My advice would be to continue making your usual payments now you no longer have any arrears on the account the 0's will start to show again.

Even if you settle the outstanding amount the defaults will remain on there (can't remember how long - think it may just be 12 months for arrears).

Sorry can't be anymore help

RAS

I though Allaince and Leicester made some sort of guarantee rechanging acounts. Get on to them and complain.

fermi

A full explanation of the Experian report can be found in:

http://www.experian.co.uk/downloads/consumer/creditfileexplained.pdf

It includes:

The table below explains what the status codes shown in your status history mean. The code shown against settled accounts relates to the period before these accounts were settled.

0 - Payments are up to date.
1 - Payments are up to one month late.
2 - Payments are up to two months late.
3 - Payments are up to three months late.
4 - Payments are up to four months late.
5 - Payments are up to five months late.
6 - Payments are six months or more late.
8 - The account is in ‘default’. You failed to keep to your credit agreement and have not responded satisfactorily to requests to bring your payments up to date, so the credit agreement has ended.
D - The account is not being used and nothing is owed.
? - The lender has not been able to provide information on the payment history for this month.
U - The lender cannot give the account a status code for this month. This may be at the start of the credit agreement when the lender is allowing time for the account to be set up, when you are waiting for goods to be delivered, when you have received the goods but payment is not due to start immediately, when there is a dispute over the payments due or the goods received, or when the account is not being used.

A formal 'default notice' issued by a creditor and recorded on your file remains for six years.

fiveyearplan

I thought the numbers represented how many months late a payment was for example 0 means paid on time, 1 means one month in arrears, 2 means two months etc. This would seem to make sense seeing as there are 2 0's for the past two months. If this is the case then this is showing the history over the last 10 months.

Serialdieter

Get on to A&L, they can prove whether it was ported to them, presumably it was on the list they send you to check. I moved to A&L last year and one of my dd didn't move across and my previous bank proved they had sent all info to A&L, so A&L had to cover the cost of the charges from the missed dd. tbh I don't find A&L very good on customer service and it took a couple of phonecalls to get it sorted.

jx

rayday2

Thanks for that fermi, so looking at your list does that mean that you can only have one default per account or that it only counts as one.

A couple of my companies issued a default a few months running - so what I am trying to ask but making no sense is - will that count as a few defaults or one?

8 - The account is in ‘default’. You failed to keep to your credit agreement and have not responded satisfactorily to requests to bring your payments up to date, so the credit agreement has ended.

See that explanation to me reads as agreement has ended so surely that can only happen once??

fermi

rayday2

You should have only one formally dated default per account.

Experian give examples of accounts in default as:

MR JOHN SMITH, 15, High Street, Anytown, Countyshire, FR3 8JU
Date of birth 09/10/52
GENERAL BANK PLC CREDIT CARD
Started 03/11/01
Status history 8 Defaulted 18/10/03 Default £358 Balance £255
File updated for the period to 15/06/04

This and other similar examples from Experian all show the monthly status code replaced by a single '8' as above.

A default is a formal notice effectively ending the credit agreement (so I'm always told) so it should only happen once with a definite date.

Either callcredit or equifax (or both) however still list status codes once defaulted though until the account is settled. Although the actual default only occurs once, the account is recorded as 'being in default' monthly. Sometimes this can be confused with receiving multiple defaults for the same account.

For example one of my old equifax/callcredit ones looked something like:

ST D D D D D D D D D D D 1 OK OK OK......

(most recent entry on the left) where ST=satisfied D= 'in default' etc.

However the original default was recorded at the date of the first D, and will drop off 6 years from that date and not the subsequent D's

If you think that a creditor is updating any of your files incorrectly I would query it with the agency. Each CRA I think has some example reports that you can download to see what a correctly maintained file looks like.

I'm going to have to send off for all 3 of my reports soon, and I'm expecting them to be messy.:eek:

I must admit that each CRA using a slightly different system/format confuses the hell out of me each time I try to figure out something to do with CRF's.:o