Natwest refusing further lending

[Wittow]

So my current mortgage is with natwest and I'm tied into a 5 year fix. Portable mortgage. I'm looking to move house in the next 6 months and phoned to see of they would lend me £50k more. This would only be a total of like 95k mortgage on a 340k property. I have a 53k salary.

It failed the "affordability" test due to credit score. Absolutely devastating.

Can natwest literally prevent me from even porting my mortgage on this basis?

What is your credit score?

Seems like it. Can you try a broker and let them find you a deal and pay the penalties to leave NatWest.

Did it fail the affordability test because you'd lose them money on the low about borrowed compared to your deal now?

My clearscore report is 698.

It would be circa a £2000 early redemption fee until 2025 🙄

I guess you need to improve your credit score. Pay off any loans you have before reapplying?

I am beginning to get the impression that lenders are robbing Peter to pay Paul at the moment (there is a mortgage war going on). Just last week our broker told us NatWest would lend us more than x5.5 my partners’ salary: 50% more than any lender would give us in May, with no salary changes. Admittedly he has a stupidly high credit rating and mine is 820, but we also have 10k in debt, 95% LTV and are 41 and 48 years old, and will only ever be a single income household. So, give all the FTBs the incentives and deny them for long term customers?

Download your credit report and check for anomalies. Then call a whole of market mortgage broker. 700ish doesn’t sound that bad to me. I don’t think the amount they are willing to lend us is ethical, refusing to offer you x2 your salary sounds just as irrational.

There are better lenders out there and they are constantly undercutting one another, so please call a broker.

Mortgage lenders in the U.K. don’t use credit scores in their decision making, scores are really just a gimmick made up by the likes of Experian etc. If they’ve said it’s due to affordability, do you have high outgoings? If they’ve said it’s your credit rating, do you have a lot of other debt, live in your overdraft, spend to the max limit on credit cards?

Mortgage broker here, whole of market.

If you've got kids or high outgoings, loans, CC etc it will significantly affect your affordability

If NatWest don't allow you to borrow more, your only option is to pay your redemption charge and move lender. I don't mean to put you off, but NatWest are more of the more generous lenders affordability wise

I have 1 PCP loan for car of 215 a month. I credit card with £393 on it. That's it. I have been overpaying my mortgage by over 1000 a month for the last year. I am fuming!!!!

Stop overpaying your mortgage and pay off your credit card and overpay your loan.

The credit card is on a 0% rate. Why would I pay off the PCP??

Have you got kids/dependents? Even if you've got a low balance on your credit card, the exposure is still there for you to spend more on it which lenders factor in

Personally I'd pay off your credit card, even if it's on 0% it's still a debt and an outgoing you could shift

Pay off your credit card, double check there's no bad marks on your credit record. Have you got very high costs? Perhaps stop overpaying your mortgage so you have a higher bank balance

Also, if you've got circa £2K redemption fee then that's only 2 months of overpaying on your mortgage.

I don't mean to be harsh, but if they won't lend you more you need to move lender. There's no point in getting in a pickle over it, if they're saying it's not affordable then there's nothing you can do about it. You'll need to move lender

Credit rating has minimal to do with affordability, it's more about how you run your accounts, missed/late payments etc, credit you've applied for

1 dependent yes. But I have like 1500 each month after essential outgoings so I would dispute affordability. I asked the advisor if it was just "computer says no" or would a human look at it and he said no. I want to move from natwest just on that basis tbh!!!

It still shows on your credit report as an outstanding debt.

I'd wager that the car is your blocker here. I had a PCP once, and the entire value of the car, as it was at the time of purchase, sits on your credit rating as borrowing. This is deducted from the amount you are able to borrow.

It's a pain in the arse and I didn't realise it worked that way. I would have expected some depreciation, but that wasn't the case.

Pay off the credit card each month even if it is zero interest and pay off your car loan asap. Is the interest on the car loan not higher than your mortgage rate anyway?

Doing this will help boost “affordability” on paper

Are you on a particularly low rate? I’d suggest it’s more likely they’re just trying to get rid of low interest fixed. Problem is that there’s no much you can do as they’d never disclose the actual problem

This is correct OP. Your credit rating doesn’t care what interest rate your credit card has. It only sees how much money you still owe. Definitely pay that off.

It's not a credit card with £393 on it that's stopping someone on a 50k salary borrowing 95k.

If Op isn’t paying her credit card balance in full each month, this will have an impact on credit score (simple google will confirm this as well). Lenders look at the simple ability of people to borrow money and pay it back, regardless of amount. Always best to pay off credit cards in full each month.

That score indicates missed payments, have you missed them?

That score doesn't tally with what you've said, unless you're regularly late/miss payments. Can you sign up to experian premium free trial and get your full credit report
This happened to DH years ago and he had a defaulted mortgage sat on his credit amount from when he would've been 11 so clearly didn't have a mortgage! It took some back and forth but it got sorted and his rating improved dramatically