Bank/CC Applications between Offer and Completion - bad idea?

fiish

I have a mortgage offer in hand for the house I'm buying, but have not exchanged yet.

Separate but related to the house purchase, spouse and I want to sort our finances a bit better, one of the steps is getting a joint account to pay the mortgage and bills, as we've been running individual accounts until now (to head off marriage finances advice, we have access to each other's internet banking and hiding nothing from each other money-wise). The switching incentives motivate us too, free money is always helpful, especially around the same time as moving!

I'm also thinking of applying for a 0% credit card to use to spread out some of the moving costs (e.g. expected repairs, furniture purchases). We have money saved and budgeted for these, so the CC would be more for stoozing/amortizing and not essential.

However, I understand these would cause credit searches. Would we risk the mortgage getting pulled with banking or credit card applications, and therefore should wait to complete before commencing any? Or am I over worrying and it's actually fine since the mortgage is already approved?

Thanks for any thoughts!

housebuyer143

Bank account fine, but taking out credit is a big no no. Do not do it until you have redeemed the mortgage.

simon_or

My broker's advice is to try and avoid hard credit checks between offer and completion. That is probably leaning on the conservative side and isn't always possible for example if you're renewing your car insurance that you pay monthly or a new mobile phone contract or a broadband contract for example.

Simply applying for a current account or credit card is perhaps unlikely to cause an issue, but if you run up new debt through an overdraft or spending on the credit card, that could be a more serious issue depending on your situation and what happens if the bank does a soft check prior to releasing funds for completion.

kingstreet

Anything involving a hard credit search should be avoided.

fiish

OK, so definitely no credit card applications then!

With bank accounts, I've read elsewhere that some banks do a hard search and some do a soft search. Sounds like it would be fine if we applied to a bank that did a soft search. That said, I'm not sure it's very clear at the point of application what search a bank is doing.

simon_or

I think it's only Chase, Starling and Monzo that do soft checks for opening a current account as long as you aren't applying for an overdraft. All the high street banks need a hard check.

amnblog

Why can you not just eliminate the risk and wait?

fiish

I can, I just wasn't very clear about whether I should/need to. 

At this stage of the conveyancing process I'm at, not much is happening. Whereas the time around completion and moving is pretty action packed and stressful, even if organized and aided with checklists etc. 

Sorting out our banking is something we'd like to do eventually, if there was no/low risk to the mortgage and therefore the purchase then it would make sense to sort the bank accounts now, when we have time and are not busy planning/organizing a move. Equally, if it was risky to do now, we'd be fine waiting until the dust settles after completion. I agree the best time to do our bank accounts is probably a year ago, but that's not possible now