Trying to mortgage whilst on benefits against an owned home to repay card debt

StepChange_Kirsty

Hi there,

I’ve just seen your post and thought I might be able to help.

At StepChange, we have a Financial Solutions team who are expert mortgage advisors that can look into whether you would be eligible for a mortgage on a benefits only income. As a charity all of our help and advice is free of charge and because our advisors are salaried, not paid on commission, you can be sure that our advice is going to be impartial. You can find their contact details here.

If the option of a mortgage is not viable or suitable for your circumstances, you can then be referred to a Debt Advisor who will look at alternative options to deal with the unsecured debts. A debt management plan (DMP), which has already been mentioned here, is one of the options we can look at. Our advice is always tailored to your individual circumstances.

I hope this is helpful and we hope to hear from you soon.

Kirsty

newmortgageseeker wrote: »

Hi Minimike2,

Thank you for your comments.

Unfortunately in our own situation, there are absolutely no protection policies in place that would help us. As you most rightly say, that would be a fantastic dusty piece of paper to find in the bottom of a drawer.

These replies seem to be stacking up towards a forum vote for a DMP strategy, which wasn't even on our radar at the time of opening the posting.

Putting aside what might appear to be common sense and the benefit of trade advice given above.
We still have a moral conscience towards the lenders and I am uncomfortable, given my age, at the prospects of destroying any credit score for the sake of an amount such as £30K.

I understand that even with a DMP, lenders do not necessarily have to engage with the process and can still add additional charges if "their" expected payments are not met and also pursue independent debt recovery which we cannot every allow to happen.

If we felt that there was and would continue to always be more than adequate scope within our means to meet the demands of a modest £30k mortgage, but obviously not enough to service card borrowing. Do you believe that every responsible lender would refuse to entertain our proposal, even if for example it was one who had £12K of the card debt, that would then be affected by a DMP if we were to go down that route?

I am certainly going to speak with StepChange to seek their advice.