After a bit of advice on Mortgage.

Atfernoon all.

My wife and I are looking to move house shortly. We've sold our house STC and we've found a new build not too far away. We want to go down the HTB route and we've currently got around £33,000 in equity after legal and estate agent fees and a further £25,000 saved up in our joint savings accounts. Ideally, we'd only like to put the minimum 5% deposit contribution in, but could offer more in, if required by the lender.

I'm self employed and have been for over 4 years now and my wife is employed full time and been in her job for over 10 years.

My NET profits are just over £30,000, GROSS around 44k and my wife's GROSS salary is £28,000 + 5k bonus per year (not guaranteed)

I've already spoken with a mortgage advisor albeit one from over the internet/phone, not a local adviser per se and due to an issue with my credit, he's suggesting we can only go via Precise mortgages as we only meet their criteria apparently.

My wife's credit history is excellent according to Experian, Equifax and the likes. No missed payments within the last 6 years, no outstanding unsecured debts currently as car finance is now showing settled (Jan) and was always paid on time, no credit cards at all ever, never used an overdraft and she's on the electoral register. Only the current mortgage shows as outstanding on all of her files.

My credit report on the other hand isn't so good. I don't have any unsecured loans although I do have a credit card with a tiny balance (less than £10 which I use to partially purchase goods for the extra protection a CC gives me.

The issue i understand with my credit is due to a catalogue account which ran into arrears back in July 2017 due to a stupid mistake on my behalf whereby I was requesting that a default be removed from the same lender for a different account I had opened as it was incorrectly added and thinking that the account would be paused so to speak whilst I protested against the default. Turns out the default was removed which is great but the payment history still shows as a status 6 in November as it was for a different account! I should have just paid it!

I quickly cleared the account after the default was removed and the account is now showing settled. Everything looks ok on the report other than this late payment sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6.

Due to this status 6 on my report, my broker thinks that Precise is the only lender that would accept the 6 months of arrears and not a high street lender seeing as it was only November when the status 6 was reported.

So my question....is the advisory talking non sense or are we using a "sledgehammer to crack a nut" as I've heard before. We don't have kids, outgoings are minimal really, nothing lavish but we've saved,....

Second question. My 2017 sole trader accounts have been compiled as of my year end (1st Dec 2017 ) 17 was a good year for me. I increased my NET profits to over £50,000 but due to the fact I haven't yet paid tax on my 2017 earnings, Precise and maybe other lenders won't take that higher profit into consideration, is that also correct?

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks

Tony.