Refused remortgage by L&C

Theodoresmum

Hi everyone,
Thanks for taking the time to read my query, any help or advice will be gratefully received.

So my partner wants to remortgage for debt consolidation and home improvement purposes. The property is worth around £700k and has no mortgage or loans of any sort against it.
However, my partner, in the last few months, was between jobs and defaulted on a couple of debts (credit cards) and ended up with a CCJ (issued last month for personal loan non-payment). He knows he was wrong to bury his head in the sand but due to personal circumstances and a new baby etc, it ended up happening and he is obviously now stuck with it.
We applied to London and Country Mortgages to arrange a remortgage now that he is back in solid employment. We want to borrow approx £35k against the property but despite his credit report (which we sent to L&C as per their request) being blemish free for every month before April this year, only owing about £12k total in debts to various credit cards as well as a personal loan and him outright owning a mortgage-free property of £700k, L&C have declined to help us saying we are too high risk for their lenders.

So my question is what could he/ should he do now?
Is remortgaging out of the question? Should he apply for a secured loan instead?
What should he do now? We literally have no clue and were banking on clearing all the debts and repaying back one, static monthly payment each month and getting the few bits around the house that so desperately need doing.

I am losing sleep over this!

Thanks so much in advance for your help x

BoGoF

Why do you need to borrow £35k if the debts you want to pay off are only £12k.

How much is his earnings?

Gary123456790

35k is a small amount for mortgage lenders, it sounds like a secured loan might suit the situation better, but you need to be sure that clearing the credit cards does not encourage fresh spending on them - perhaps they are just a symptom of unsteady employment.

Also sounds like you need to build up a rainy day fund, to avoid cc spending for car/boiler/roof problems.

thanks.

ACG

There are lenders out there. They are unlikely to be on the high street due to how recent that CCJ is and any arrears etc. Rates could be up to around 3.5%.

L&C are probably not really the broker for you as they only really do "vanilla" cases, which you will not fall in to. Nothing against L&C as such, but you should probably get a non call centre based broker on it. Someone who will take the time to look at your case properly and is experienced in quirky cases.

haras_nosirrah

as l&c don't charge a fee they probably feel the small amount of money they would earn in commission on a 35k mortgage is not worth their time

There will be lenders available but expect to pay a broker fee

Theodoresmum

Thanks for your replies! It's made me feel a bit more positive!
£12k is his debt, I have around £10k debt and we have some stuff that needs to be done around the house that we've been putting off.
We are cutting up all cards and are going to be setting up a savings account to make sure this never happens again.
How can I find a good mortgage broker who may specialise in this kind of thing? Would it be a simple case of Googling it?

Thanks again x

dunstonh

How can I find a good mortgage broker who may specialise in this kind of thing?

Any local independent firm should be fine.