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NS ESA - Adding UC claim
Comments
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BIT OT
Amex for one certainly does check. Had the card 4 years, never missed a payment and always paid the full balance, they just reduced my limit from £9900 to £900! Almost certainly because I opened a number of other credit cards that I maxed out.
Even MBNA pulled a BT offer half way though the month, which has never happened before.Let's Be Careful Out There0 -
The income side is the really interesting element. For obvious reasons I had a really good fish around to try and find out how lenders remotely verify income (and not just what individuals claim). As part of this I scan read dozens of affordability complaints that had been raised with the ombudsman.
In nearly every claim the lender lost, the adjudicator claimed the lender should have done more to verify income. In spite of the borrower fabricating their position. I don't recall all of them, but there are several methods that were outlined, that lenders were expected to utilise (aside from obtaining payslips et al).
I don't have hands on experience in this area, it must be a fine balance between confidentiality, and some kind of aggregated data that is permitted to be shared to prevent fraud, laundering et al. After my research anyway, I determined that I was unlikely to be able to keep the offers rolling in for five years. I have absolutely no plans to extend the amount I have borrowed, I want to pay all of my unsecured debt down. But circumstances mean that would be impossible with standard rate interest on credit card liabilities.
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as another credit card account kept asking me to verify my details in that app. But you could click out. Eventually they placed a deadline on it, the next time they stated that I would be locked out of the app if I didn't fill in the details. I had a current account with them as well, so switched that and never logged in to the app since.
That will be Know Your Customer details update.
Which if you do not comply will lead to account being fully blocked until completed.
Life in the slow lane0 -
I'm familiar with these. But the message in the app said something like, it would be locked if I logged in again after that last time, ie it still let me operate the account at that point. So I've complied so far!
Yes it's dancing on the head of a pin, but I think that happened in December. No further developments, I continue to make my contracted payments. It will be settled imminently, now that I am applying for UC.
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. It all depends upon what someone is borrowing for and how much they are asking to borrow. The obvious one is for mortgages, as a large long term loan lenders will require evidence of employment, income and expenditure plus a few bank statements to help verify things.
For credit cards and loans the sums will be less, but as unsecured credit the lender is more vulnerable to not being repaid. The amount borrowed probably influences the proportionality of checks lenders make, they can still verify income declared by the borrower and/or ask for bank statements but this can be quite onerous for smaller sums. Alternatively lenders can use things like CATO (current account turnover data) and evidence of financial stress from CRA's. They can also use ONS data for typical expenditure. Both of which are an acceptable method to use and can be automated so a credit application can be approved much faster
In your scenario and lack of offers it's possible that lenders have picked up on your income through CATO data supplied by CRA's.
There are plenty of affordability claims made to the FSO that aren't upheld. Indeed a search using the keyword of 'Affordability' produces over 4,000 decisions made this year. Of those decisions only 558 were upheld although I haven't filtered through these as to what financial product was complained about.
Affordability complaints along with CCA requests are now a standard path to take for anyone in financial stress, if successful it will at least clear any interest due on the loans or, in the case of a failed CCA request, render the entire debt unenforceable. Lenders have to lend or else they make no profit but undoubtedly have tightened things up, they had to or else they would be taken to the cleaners.
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The thing that surprised me most is that I would have expected to see complaints from borrowers falsifying their income to be thrown in the proverbial bin. That was far from the case, and most (if not all) of the adjudicators still placed the responsibility with the lender. I know there is the threat of a CFAS marker, but there doesn't appear to be any real world jeopardy for those falsifying their financial information, such as income, on an unsecured borrowing application.
It could get dicey for me early next year, especially with my locked savings, but my path is in train now. If anything I possibly had too many options when this all started, but for definite now I am going down the UC route, under £6K capital, and hope that settling a load of liability will have a positive impact with existing lenders.
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How much do you have in locked savings?
According to last review a couple of months ago UC reports £177.
Life in the slow lane0 -
£5,853.77 !
As it happens, I was running the numbers again this morning and now I feel like I might need to wait another month. In my calculations, I totally forgot that the big payments toward the credit cards will be before the respective new statements are generated. So for example if I pay £4K off a card, I will still need to make the next minimum payment, before the first UC payment kicks in.
£1K of that is released in September, so September would be absolutely fine.
It's quite frustrating, £1,550 of that locked amount is not actually fully locked, but in accounts I'm waiting for TCB to process the cashback. £1,000 of the £1,550 is 2 CSD cashbacks that are received but pending, the cashback is £150 each (£500 each account). I suppose could take out £500, and lose £150 cashback, which is actually less than I'd receive in UC and CT support. I'm thinking 'out loud' as I'm typing this out. The most logical thing to do is to forgo that £150 cashback, but it would be irritating to put it mildly!
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Wayyy off topic now!
UC and CT support for a month, is worth about £300.
Yield on savings for the extra month about £100, plus £150. So still slightly better off forgoing the £150 cashback.
Anyone who follows the investments cashback thread will be aware that the second CSD cashback was a bit of a punt anyway (that landed).
The third option, actually the one I'm least attracted to, is apply for UC with capital under £16K but over £6K. That is a faff as I would subsequently need to manually apply for CT support and have to go to the job centre to show them all of the evidence of declared capital.
Forgoing the £150 cashback also means, in theory, being able to apply for SMI a month earlier.
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I would hate to give up the CB, but if it worked out better I would have too. Also CB isn't guaranteed, so for me I wouldn't want to give up more for less and might not even get the less.
If it didn't cost that much, I would also be waiting to be under £6k.
Let's Be Careful Out There1
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