You have your mortgage, you have moved into your new home or remortgaged. Then in a couple of years time when your mortgage deal is coming to an end what happens?
Whenever we speak to customers who are looking for a mortgage after getting into difficulties with their credit commitments, we look at a number of different things.
One of the key parts is how old is the adverse and how much is there. There are 2 reasons for this:
- It helps us to determine what the options are now and,
- It helps up to determine potential options down the line.
When looking at what the current options are, we are looking at what is on the credit report:
- How many issues are on there,
- How recent are they,
- Have they been satisfied and
- How long will it be before we think we can start to look at normal or near normal rates?
With the above in mind we are then looking at when they are likely to drop off and in turn how long the customer should tie in for. As an example, if you have 2-3 defaults from 4 years ago, it makes little sense to tie into a 5 year fixed rate unless we can get you decent rates.
Likewise, if you have 10 defaults registered 6 months ago it probably makes more sense to do a 3 or 5 year fixed rate if we can to allow the adverse to age enough to mean we can look at normal/near normal rates when the current deal finishes.
What happens after the initial period?
In the months coming up to your current deal finish we can start to look at what your options will be. In an ideal world, all of the adverse will have aged as we had hoped with no new negative markers.
Assuming that is the case and everything else is as we would like. For example you pass affordability, you fit criteria and so on. We can then start to look at what options we have, all being well that will be on the high street.
However, if there are other issues we then need to take a look at your situation again. Especially at the moment it is not uncommon to come across people who have had more recent adverse. Covid has had a massive impact on people. We are seeing people who had credit problems between maybe 2016-2019 and then again in 2020-21. The most recent is due to covid either directly or indirectly, job losses, illness, having to care for family etc.
If that is the case, dont worry. We have lenders who can help, it may be that we still do not have the high street lenders available but that does not mean you are stuck on a standard variable rate which is usually higher and at risk of change with little notice.
Summary
For most people whether the the last few years have been good or bad, there are usually options. What those options will look like will depend on what your circumstances look like and how the mortgage market is in general.
However the key thing is that even if times have not been great – get in touch. Hopefully we can help, but even if not, we can put a plan in place.