mortgage arrears

[beasmum]

can anyone advise? my dh and I have just completed the sale of our house. for reasons of getting ds into local primary, we pushed through the sale quickly by moving to rented accommodation.

we were with halifax for our mortgage and as soon as they received a request for a mortgage redemption statement from our solicitor, they stopped collecting the mortgage! (from december 05). When I got a letter about this, i contacted them and said I was very surprised they had not collected december's as I had not instructed them to stop! what a silly system!

anyway, due to being unwell, and christmas, I ended up paying both december and january's payment over the phone in the first few days of this year. our mortgage has been paid off in full now.

I am informed though that because Dec payment came in January they will not undo any adverse credit rating we get through this! We have been homeowners for around ten years and have never had any arrears before on this or on any loan.

Anyone know if this will affect our getting another mortgage? am so worried about us being classed as having had arrears. Help! thanks.

[Milliways]

They would not have registered your arrears with a CRA unless you had written warning that they would do if you did not pay by X date.

If you were getting a second mortgage then the first Mortgagor fills in a questionnaire re repayments - will not apply to you.

You can always check your own Credit History with Experian or Equifax, will give you time to sort out any problems. Worst case will show 1 late payment, fully satisfied. Very doubtful they would register anything as loads goes wrong with Mortgages being repaid (normally payments cancelled & then exchange collapses).

Good luck with House Hunting

[catsmother]

Hi ... I doubt very much that this hiccup will stp you getting a mortgage in the future.

If you get a copy of your credit file from either Experian or Equifax (the 2 main credit agencies, it costs £2), you'll see that under each item of credit, there's a string of digits:

eg: 00000100001

A '0' means that that month's payment was received on time, a '1' means you were a month late. '2' means 2 months late etc. There are other abbreviations too, which indicate CCJs, defaults etc., but you'll be sent guidelines which explain how to read your file.

I suspect you'll have a '1' for December, but the rest of your file will show a string of '0's'. Up to 24 months of payments are shown per item.

If the rest of your credit record is okay, I don't think this single late payment would affect you - though to be on the safe side, I think I'd ask the Halifax for an explanatory letter which confirms that when they got the redemption request from your sols, they didn't collect payments from that point on.

This is so if you have any future problems, you could show this to another lender. The best thing with any potential problem when applying for a mortgage is to be upfront about it, so maybe attach this letter to your application.

I used to work for a lender and they can correct mistakes on people's credit files if necessary - I know, I used to contact the agencies to ask them to do it. Sometimes, less experienced staff would somehow end up doing 3 or 4 searches (when only 1 was needed) which can impact upon someone's credit rating. Occasionally, there were other glitches where an apparent arrear was shown incorrectly.

I don't understand why Halifax won't correct your file if a '1' has gone on ...... if a payment is late due to their error and not yours. Ask to speak to a manager (as opposed to a call centre robot) if you haven't already.

[Orinoco]

Message withdrawn

[beasmum]

thankyou guys for your helpful replies. If you are still keeping an eye on this thread which I dount! I only seem to get time to log on to mumsnet when I'm at work!!!!xx