Credit Card Late Payments and Mortgage Application

Whistler23

Hello kind and helpful people of MSE.

Hopefully a fairly straight forward one for you all on a cold Tuesday morning!

The Girlfriend and I are looking to get a mortgage (I had planned to have applied by now), and I've got a question regarding 2 late payments my girlfriend had on her barclaycard this time last year. Our daughter was born in November 14 and I insisted my girlfriend had a year off work. She returned to work in November 15. In October we had an idea about asking Barclaycard if they would freeze her payments for a month as we had depleted our savings and it was coming up to Christmas etc.

She phoned them and asked the question and they wanted her to go through Stepchange so we said no, as it wasn't a debt we could pay, we were simply asking a question on what I would call a payment holiday for a month, possibly two just to ease our finances a little. In the end she spoke to someone different at Barclaycard and they offered a re-aging. If I remember correctly it is where they freeze the payment but still charge the interest applicable at that time. So we went for it and all was OK.

Until earlier this year and we decided to look for our own place together. We actually saw a property in July that we really liked and got the Mortgage Adviser attached to the estate agent to apply for a mortgage. We got turned down by Natwest and Nationwide. So after this I started to scrutinize our Credit Files.

Reading this forum I now know the errors of our ways, not to use the mortgage people attached to estate agents and also getting our files in order.

So fastforward to today. My girlfriend has two late/missed payments on her Barclaycard. I am half tempted to complain, if only so they could train their staff to inform the customer that a re-aging will go down as a late payment.

Her credit file reads
Month October November December January
Payment £0 £0 £217 £217
Indicator 1 2 2 2

So with that, will a lender look at it as no missed payments in the last year (November 16 being month 13) or will we have to wait until January to be the month 13?

What's really frustrating is that we didn't need to actually have the re-aging as we could have borrowed the cash else where, we just didn't want to ask family/friends. If we were aware of the late payment marker we wouldn't have entertained the thought as we had an idea we would be looking to buy a home this year.

Thanks for the help!

csgohan4

how are your finances now? deposit? salary e.t.c?


Insisting on your partner being off work after a baby was interesting

Whistler23

Finances now are pretty good. Recently cleared a load of debt.

Have 10% deposit on purchase price. Don't really want to go higher if possible. Have money for fees. Ideally property tax, can't remember what it's called now!l will be paid by credit card as we want to have a few grand for decorating etc.

Girlfriends credit card has £0/£9k balance.
A loan of about £600 finishing in April.
I have two loans with about £7k outstanding.
A credit card that is £1k/£4k balance (work expenses so I am owes the full amount retrospectively with payment every 2 weeks, so not actually my spends).

We are at about £69k joint with said baby's childcare to come off which is about £400 a month all paid via salary sacrifice.

And out of interest, why do you find it interesting I wanted her to have a year off?

ap1985

Not sure if they will allow you to pay stamp duty by credit card

kingstreet

ap1985 wrote: »

Not sure if they will allow you to pay stamp duty by credit card

Nope. Solicitor has to have cleared funds in hand ahead of completion. It's a CML Handbook requirement.

Solicitor will also not pay 3% merchant fee on credit card transaction.

Whistler23

OK, cheers guys, Will swap our plans over then. Will do fees on credit card and stamp duty with debit card.

Also got a family member willing to give us some cash if we need it after the move.

tidds

Just in-case anyone says you can't, make sure the solicitor you pick is happy to receive fee's on credit card without additional charge. We did just that in April this year, put our fee's on credit card and the stamp duty was paid via bank transfer. Good luck.

Whistler23

Thank you Tidds, I'll be sure to add that to the list of things to ask!

ShivasPlace

ap1985 wrote: »

Not sure if they will allow you to pay stamp duty by credit card

Point 23 on the following link needs to be updated then!

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/mortgages/buying-a-home-timeline

ap1985

ShivasPlace wrote: »

Point 23 on the following link needs to be updated then!

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/mortgages/buying-a-home-timeline

Hmm that's interesting!

Thrugelmir

Whistler23 wrote: »

What's really frustrating is that we didn't need to actually have the re-aging as we could have borrowed the cash else where, we just didn't want to ask family/friends.

Chalk it up to experience then. Any kind of breach of a contractual arrangement will be viewed dimly. Is has to be reported to make the data held by CRA's hold any value. The information being shared with other interested parties. There's no such thing as a free lunch in this world.