Payment Holiday started before 31st October but finishing after 31st October

arunj

On the Coronavirus Finance and Bills Help page by Naomi Schraer it mentions that the mortgage holiday credit score protection ends on 31st October (or after your second three month payment holiday if that's sooner) - what does this mean?

If my Payment Holiday started before 31st October but finishes after 31st October will my credit score be affected, also my second point is if I apply for my second three month payment holiday after 31st October will this be reported on my credit score?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can clarify, would really appreciate it if the author of the article could clarify.

Jeremy535897

See https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/mortgages-coronavirus-consumers

My reading of this is that the answers to the questions in your second paragraph are no to the first point, yes to the second point.

Thrugelmir

Payment holidays will be be viewed negatively when lenders consider future applications for credit. 

Yahoo_Mail

Payment holidays will be obvious to anyone looking at your credit file.  There doesn't need to be a black mark against your name.  What's done is done.  Try to find a way to start repaying that debt.

popdriggle

I’m finding the short deadline for payment holidays very frustrating. I purposely held out and did my utmost best to avoid having to take payment holidays, hopeful that my business would pick back up again. After 6 months of no business since the start of lockdown and not eligible for any of the government’s financial support packages, I’d exhausted my credit cards and overdrafts to get by, and had no choice but to apply for payment holidays. Although my business has slowly started rebuilding these past couple of months, I’m unlikely to see a huge surge in business this year with Christmas around the corner, so I’ve requested payment holiday extensions before the end of the deadline. However, the common theme amongst banks is we can’t apply an extension until your current payment holiday is close to ending, which will be beyond the deadline and therefore any options available to me will all impact my credit file! How is this fair?! If I had applied for a payment holiday before I needed it, taken advantage of the offer the banks were given despite not desperately requiring it at the time, I would have been able to access a 6 month payment holiday without any impact to my credit file. I thought I was doing the right thing, but clearly not, it’s totally backfired! I’m really surprised that with people losing jobs and more cities going into local lockdowns that the deadline has not been extended or something put in place to stop credit files being impacted. The government know that this is not over yet and people are still struggling, hence why further support packages have been put in place, yet payment holidays are now impacting credit files after just 6 months of being in place. I’m hopeful that there will be a change in the support offered to avoid impacting credit files.

MattMattMattUK

You can not afford your current commitments, a payment holiday having an impact on your credit record is of minor importance if it means avoiding a default. 

Anyone unable to meet their financial obligations will see that reflected in their credit record, even those who took the early payment holidays are seeing an impact, the only difference to normal times is that is was not marked as a default.

The idea that payment holidays do not impact credit records is naive and wrong.