Credit File Query

MWAUGH1983

Hi,

I was wondering about active credit cards and the taboo subject that if they are nil they can be a bad thing for your credit file.

If you have say £3,000 worth of credit cards say 2 or 3 with £1000 limits, 2 had nill balance and one was max to £1k limit, would this have a negative affect on your file?

If your file shows how much credit you have taken then surely its a good thing to have available credit ?

Strummer22

MWAUGH1983 wrote: »

Hi,

I was wondering about active credit cards and the taboo subject that if they are nil they can be a bad thing for your credit file.

If you have say £3,000 worth of credit cards say 2 or 3 with £1000 limits, 2 had nill balance and one was max to £1k limit, would this have a negative affect on your file?

If your file shows how much credit you have taken then surely its a good thing to have available credit ?

Due to the murkiness of the criteria by which lenders decide whether they want to lend to someone or not, there's no simple answer to this.

Having some debt is good if you always make your payments on time.
Using most of your available credit (across all your accounts) would probably be considered bad by a majority of lenders.
Having a credit card open but with zero balance is probably neither here nor there, however I've read that a very large amount of unused credit might spook a mortgage lender as you might get your mortgage and then put £40k on credit (home improvements maybe ) and then be unable to afford your mortgage because of the credit card debt.

I guess the most pragmatic approach would be to keep credit cards that you use regularly or might need in the future, otherwise close them. I paid off and closed a couple of cards when their intro 0% periods ended just because I was never going to use them again. I don't recall a significant effect on my made up number from the CRAs.

MWAUGH1983

Yeah there is that, you may use the credit. Suppose having one credit card with a nil balance would be an idea.

Cheers!