Can you use credit cards at all when either porting or extending a mortgage?

KnopeKnopeKnope

We are selling our house and looking around. We currently have very low mortgage payments and almost enough in savings to pay our mortgage off but due our children’s needs we have to move. Due to all this, we ideally we don’t want to borrow any more / only increase borrowing slightly so we don’t have a big increase in outgoings at least until our rate goes up! It does mean we are looking at cheaper / less ideal properties than we could get, but worth it to us for the peace of mind and knowing we’ll still be able to save at the same rate.

When we went through the decision in principle with our lender (they agreed what they would lend us maximum so we knew our budget, but it’s unlikely we will use it all) we each had about £1000 showing on our credit cards / credit file due to a couple of recent purchases. Although they had been paid off by the time we did it, the credit files seem to take weeks to update and show zero balance. 

I know that lenders will often run another credit check at completion and if there’s suddenly debt there it can impact things. I’m just wondering if there’s a threshold for this (say a percentage of credit utilisation) or whether you just can’t use them at all? I’m just trying to work out whether we can pay some fees (survey, conveyancing, moving company etc) on credit to maximise the budget we have without extending our mortgage / extending it minimally. We have 0% interest cards so I’d rather put fees on a credit card than borrow more from the mortgage company, and if we don’t extend our mortgage we could clear the cards quickly. Does the fact that we had a grand each on credit cards when they ran the checks mean it will be fine if we have that at completion? 

If we are just porting do they even check again? 

For reference, I have about £11k credit available, my husband has about £17k available, both zero balance. Infuriatingly one of my credit scores has been lowered by that purchase since that card only has a £3k limit and so it was over 30% (wouldn’t have done it had I known and frustrated that it takes so long to update!). It’s a shame not to be able to take some advantage of that, especially now you can’t pay stamp duty on credit cards!

DullGreyGuy

Ask your mortgage broker where you are on the affordability once you know the value of the property and what your particular lender's view to these things would be.

We continued to use our cards as normal, which includes business travel so a good amount will have been paid off from the prior month but then readded for the following month, I think the net was about a £3k increase.

Certainly my brother-in-law had about £40k in credit card debt when he got his mortgage but he was vastly below the decision in principle amount lenders had been said they'd be prepared to lend. 

kingstreet

Porting means the terms and conditions move to a new mortgage which is subject to the same checks as any other new mortgage. A £ for £ new application may receive less vigorous tests though.

KnopeKnopeKnope

Thank you both, that’s helpful. We have of course just seen something we love which would mean borrowing more (sigh) so I’ll definitely ask the lender about credit card usage if we get to that point

Jonboy_1984

Does your lender have a “for intermediaries” website such as  https://www.santanderforintermediaries.co.uk/ or https://intermediaries.virginmoney.com/virgin/ as these have detailed anonymous calculators where you could play around with different loan/debt figures to see what it does to overall affordability.