Source of funds and paperwork

MDMD

I am in the process of looking for a First Time property and in the next six months or so am planning on applying for a mortgage.

 I read somewhere that there is a rule of thumb that you need to supply three months worth of bank statements for proof of funds and affordability calculations etc. Obviously it will vary depending on the lender and every lender is different but what can I do to clean things up to make them more likely to approve it.

Like many on this forum I have quite a few accounts (around 45 when you include current accounts, saving accounts, regular savers, pensions, ISAs, 0% BT credit cards etc.)

I’m expecting to be required to supply statements for everything on my credit reports but when I’ve been through the process before I spoke to someone at HSBC that said I needed to supply savings accounts too. 

Do I really need to supply every single savings account, even those that don’t form part of the deposit, right down to a Tesco internet saver with a nil balance that I haven’t got round to closing? Are they genuinely going to travel through these?

How does supplying bank statements prove the source of funds as I have been saving for ten years or so and the deposit is more than three times my annual net salary and have opened and closed many accounts in that time? The ultimate source is salary and bank interest. I have payslips for past 6 years and P60s going back 20 years if they really insist!

Would it be worth consolidating them or would that be more transactions to explain?

[Deleted User]

I personally just supplied my main bank account statements and a copy of my Nationwide savings book that had the deposit building up. 

I have two other bank accounts but they only have small amounts in - I just use them for food budgeting. I never bothered with them. I had my mortgage offers within 24 hours - I didn't get the impression they poured over them in much detail. 

davidmcn

The savings accounts shouldn't be relevant, though if you have payments going to them from other accounts, the lender might want to check the money is going to your own accounts rather than paying some liability to someone else.

Three (or so) months is being realistic, on the basis that if you were receiving money from somebody else in contemplation of your purchase (whether an undeclared gifted deposit/loan or money laundering) they'd give it to you shortly before the transaction and not many months in advance ie its safe to presume that money resting in your account for several months probably is yours. They need to draw the line somewhere. Bear in mind your solicitor needs to check this too and their requirements may be different. 

Windofchange

We had nowhere near 45 accounts, but did have around 6 between us that we had money in for our deposit. We were just asked for 3 months worth of statements from any account that we were using for the deposit. They weren't interested in my ISA as I wasn't using that for any deposit money. I found the process to be less rigorous than I was expecting - our solicitor didn't check everything to the penny, but I think he must have got to the point where he was happy we weren't up to anything nefarious and signed it all off. 

JanBayford

I have recently crystallised my pension and taken my tax free cash which, for me anyway, is quite a large amount. I swapped banks about 12 months ago to Triodos for ethical reasons. Once the cash had arrived from Aegon, I received a secure email from Triodos asking me where the money had come from, which was quite reasonable.  So I replied, enclosing the documents sent to me by Aegon confirming what each payment was. Now, Triodos have come back to me asking how the pension fund was built up, including all employee and employer contributions. I think this is outrageous. Are they entitled to ask for this information?

K_S

@janbayford It's a pita, but they can ask for it to satisfy AML concerns. It does sound like overkill for a payment from a financial institution like Aegon, but it's subjective as to what you can ask for.

I was asked the same thing when I transferred a lumpsum from my Vanguard S&S ISA to a Monese account. I just pulled a pdf dump of the transactions from Vanguard and sent it across to them and that was that. Can you get a transaction statement from your Aegon login, send it to Triodos and say that's the best you can do?