Halifax after creditor in DMP?

karenb51

Hi all, my husband and I were informed by our broker yesterday that we have been granted a DIP (85% LTV), however, when I got off the phone I realised he hadn’t said who the lender was. As it was the end of the day, I sent an email asking him to confirm the lender, but won’t get a response till next week I assume. 

On checking my credit file, I can see a soft search was performed on the 13th, organisation name is ‘ Bank of Scotland plc (SR, SA, TAC)’, and search unit name is ‘ Halifax Mortgage (CR BSB API)’. Does this mean the DIP is from Halifax? I am very surprised if so as we had a DMP in 2013 (finished in March 2017 and paid in full), and several of our included credit accounts were with Halifax. In fact, they were the only creditor to default us on the one joint loan we had, even though it was paid in full including interest, just over a longer term. However, this default dropped off our files last year so is no longer visible. The other debts we had with them were a credit card each, again both paid in full in the end but with reduced/frozen interest. We both have had squeaky clean credit files since the day the DMP ended, and my husband still banks with Halifax and has a cc with them (very low balance and well managed). 

I have heard many reports in the past that you should never bother trying to borrow from creditors that you once had adverse credit with, that there is an internal ‘blacklist’ of sorts and you would always be undesireable to them, regardless of how good your credit file is. Our broker has copies of our credit reports and is fully aware of the DMP. If the DIP is with Halifax I will remind him that they were one of our creditors when I speak to him, but as it’s the weekend, I’m just sitting here driving myself crazy! I would hate to get way down the track with a purchase and then get declined for this, when the information was freely available all along, but equally - we have passed the soft search so the lender already knows who we are!! 

Does anyone have any experience of this, or can any of the brokers on here advise whether this DIP is likely to be a non-starter? Thanks in advance - sorry for the wall of text! 

Thrugelmir

Bank of Scotland, Halifax are both under the Lloyds umbrella. Generally finance companies do take a hard line these days. As hold a black list internally of historical delinquent customers. 

karenb51

Thank you - that’s what I thought. I think I just need to remind the broker and we start again. Does make me worry about else he may have overlooked though...

Thrugelmir

karenb51 said:

Thank you - that’s what I thought. I think I just need to remind the broker and we start again. Does make me worry about else he may have overlooked though...

We all learn from experience every day. Many people are unaware of historical financial relationships (i.e. who owns who). Always worth pointing something out if you are aware yourself. 

karenb51

I just wanted to update this in case anyone else is in the same position and finds the thread. I can scarcely believe it, but we received our mortgage offer from Halifax this afternoon! We were requesting more than the standard 4.49x salary multiple too, so with that and all of our past adverse history, I am absolutely gobsmacked. We applied last Tuesday so the whole application took exactly a week.

This isn’t to say everyone with adverse credit should flock to Halifax - more to give a massive shoutout to (good) brokers! I think our situation is exactly where a broker can be worth their weight in gold. I went through every detail of our history with ours, and then he was able to go through it all with the lender and get some confidence that they were happy to lend before we all wasted our time. It didn’t stop the sleepless nights once we’d applied, but in the end it was a breeze - we didn’t have to answer a single query! Our situation was very straightforward aside from the past adverse, which helped I think - we are both employed, no additional income and neither of us have been financially affected by covid at all so far.

I have spent some time this evening having a little cry, haha - it feels like we’ve come such a long way since posting on the debt boards (under a different username!), and I didn’t really ever think we’d be get back to owning our own home again! I know we’re not in yet and there are many other things that can go wrong, but we are hopefully on our way now.