Car lease/credit report

[BrianWankum]

I’m currently 3 years into a 4 year car lease contract, and had an email saying I could apply to extend it for up to 5 years. I thought this would be useful to have a fixed outgoing for the next couple of years, so I applied, haven’t changed the annual allowance. But I’ve had my application rejected saying it’s because of information in my credit report! My credit score is 971 and I have no debt of any kind, no credit cards either. Is it worth paying to get my full report to try to work out what’s going on? As I’m now wondering what else I’m going to have problems with in the future. Or worth phoning the lease company in case it is some simple issue to resolve?

Never been turned down after a credit check before, and I’m feeling quite thrown (have had a shit week anyway), so any advice would be appreciated.

You're likely suffering from having what's known as a 'thin credit file' meaning that having no credit means there's no proof you can handle debt responsibly (the credit score is a meaningless number made up by some of the credit services, the lenders use their own algorithms to make decisions).

However it does seem odd in your circumstances as you've kept up with payments on the agreement up to now and they offered you the chance to extend it.

It's never worth paying for a full credit report as this is available for free from credit karma or money saving expert credit club. So have a look at these in case there's a mistake on your file.

It's also a good idea to get a credit card and use it for some of your normal spending, paying off in full every month by direct debit to pad out your credit history.

For the car, it's probably 'computer says no' so I'd write to them and ask them to reconsider their decision.

Download clear score op it's free and I have found that Experian rate me really high, I'm in the 900s aswell with them but when I went to get car finance recently I could see on their screen I was marked red for credit. Clear score was more accurate and I was way lower.