My credit worthiness

tomxlisa

Currently in the credit repair stages as I had some financial problems years ago due to issues out of my control and my credit took a beating for it, missed/defaulted payments and CCJs unfortunately, anyways a few years or so on and I’m trying my hardest to mend and build up my credit again, but I’m a little confused by all this, I’ve managed to get myself a couple of credit cards, I’ve had these several months now, both started with £200 and £1200 limits, both been upped to £800 and £2,200 now so not bad, anyways when I do the eligibility checkers online it basically says I can’t get anything at all, results come back as if I’ve got the worst credit in the world, but surely it can’t be that bad if I’ve managed to get 2 cards which have limits increased in a matter of months, I’ve still got 4 defaults on my report and 2 CCJs these are all years old though, would it be these that are still crippling my worthiness or are these checkers not much to go by?. Thanks. 

[Deleted User]

Your last tomxlisa said:

Currently in the credit repair stages as I had some financial problems years ago due to issues out of my control and my credit took a beating for it, missed/defaulted payments and CCJs unfortunately, anyways a few years or so on and I’m trying my hardest to mend and build up my credit again, but I’m a little confused by all this, I’ve managed to get myself a couple of credit cards, I’ve had these several months now, both started with £200 and £1200 limits, both been upped to £800 and £2,200 now so not bad, anyways when I do the eligibility checkers online it basically says I can’t get anything at all, results come back as if I’ve got the worst credit in the world, but surely it can’t be that bad if I’ve managed to get 2 cards which have limits increased in a matter of months, I’ve still got 4 defaults on my report and 2 CCJs these are all years old though, would it be these that are still crippling my worthiness or are these checkers not much to go by?. Thanks. 

You're doing well there 👍😊
This is key.
These credit checkers/credit reference agencies are a data gathering service and their algorithm does what you're looking at re the numbers.  
So yes, they're not much to go by.

Hour after hour members, especially new,  will post an agonised thread asking how their life will be impacted by the numbers.

What everyone should be focused on is the data, not the score number.

If we take the time to really study each page of the file it's the data that tells us, and a financial institutions, how good we are at managing our own financial affairs.

Whether we are lazy and don't keep all financial bodies informed of a house move-address change / emigration / status change / etc...
Or, whether we keep up to date on the minute details - in our busy lives this is tedious - but it's an honest reflection of us.

Our financial conduct is there and it's our responsibility to ensure that the information within it is up to date and accurate.
Often we blame the other party for not fulfilling their obligations but the buck really does stop with us.

tomxlisa

Not sure if you understood what my actual question was but basically do the eligibility checkers mean a whole lot, like I’ve run myself through them recently and they are saying no to every type of credit card yet yesterday I managed to open two mail order accounts so surely my credit worthiness can’t be as bad as the checkers are making out, yes I’ve got two CCJs on my files but there a couple of years old now, and I’ve got four defaults again years old now, so what is making these checkers don’t back with such a negative outcome, I’ve also got two credit cards active as well, maybe it’s the hard searches that are knocking my chances of better results or maybe it’s the fact I’ve got too many hard searches on my files which is giving such negative results, just confuses me as the checkers say I can’t basically get anything which points to my credit file being terrible but then I manage to open a new mail order account just recently, I get that the credit score is meaningless, anyone else shine any light on this?. Thanks. 

CliveOfIndia

Well, the eligibility checks give you a rough indication of your likelihood of being accepted.  You can use a generic third-party checker, which will look at the data that is available from a soft search and it will give you a result based on publicly-available criteria from each lender.  Slightly better is to use a lender's own eligibility checker - this will at least factor in some (not all) of their particular acceptance criteria, although it still only uses the sub-set of your data that's available from a soft search.

Either way, it's not until you do a full application that you'll get a definitive answer.  A full application entails a hard search, meaning all of your data is visible to a lender, they run that through their algorithms and give you a result.

So yes, an eligibility checker can be useful, but it's by no means a guarantee.

tomxlisa said:

maybe it’s the hard searches that are knocking my chances of better results or maybe it’s the fact I’ve got too many hard searches on my files which is giving such negative results

Lots of hard searches in a short space of time will usually raise a few red flags for lenders.  Whilst they cannot see the result of a search (i.e. whether you were accepted or not), the obvious conclusion is that if you're making lots of searches then you're being declined for most of them.

tomxlisa said:

they are saying no to every type of credit card yet yesterday I managed to open two mail order accounts

Each lender will have different acceptance criteria (one reason why the score you see on your CRA report is meaningless).  So one lender, for instance, may have no issue with a default that's over 2 years old, for the sake of argument.  Another lender may be OK with a single CCJ, another lender may have a policy of "any CCJ at all is an instant refusal".  The criteria used by each lender is confidential, commercially sensitive and usually involve a fairly complex array of different permutations of each data point.  Unfortunately you'll never know what a particular lender's criteria are, or why you've been rejected.

FindMyWayBack

The MSE credit report (Experian) is good, their eligibility  checker is awful. 
CreditKarma's report is ok-ish usually a bit out of date, but their card eligibility search is good and shows cards on percentage of acceptance.