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How Craig do you start off trying to get a mortgage in the first place?
Ok -- well the first thing I'd say- to give everyone -kind of- a bit of hope -- I mean
this is all -- sounds daunting -- and what I'm about to say is quite daunting -- but
last year, which was a historically relatively low year for first time buyers, it's coming
up from previous lows we've seen, but last year we think there would be about 350,000
first time buyers successfully bought a house, so it's not just the people in this room,
you're not that rare, there's a lot of people that have managed to successfully navigate.
Probably the most important thing you can do is start to plan early. So really, obviously,
you need to go and talk to a mortgage lender -- be that a bank, or go and see a broker
or a building society to talk about how much you can borrow. But really you need to start
-- be planning as far before that point as possible, because you need to think about
saving up your deposit, because whatever type of house you buy and whatever type of scheme
-- or not in a scheme- you're going to need some type of deposit. So you need to think
about saving the deposit up. And the other thing you need is - credit score's really
important. So, you know, you can change your credit score over time, so if you've had issues
with your credit score in the past, you can change that over time. So you need to make
sure that you've got a reasonable credit score and that you've worked out how much deposit
you think you're going to need. Can I just ask how you change your credit
score? Yeah -- so the first thing is -- find out
what your credit score is. I probably shouldn't be asking the questions
here -- this is to benefit you -- but I am intrigued.
Yeah, so the first thing is find out what your credit score is -- the two biggest credit
companies in the country will allow you to do it online for -- I think it's about £2
or £2.50 -- to get a credit score, so try and work out what your credit score is. Personal
circumstances, so you need to see if you're -- you know - if you've lived in, as a student,
maybe with friends, and one of them has got a bad credit score, potentially you can get
attached to that. If you find that out you can then appeal to the credit company and
get removed from that and say 'look - you know -- this isn't my wife or boyfriend or
whatever, this is someone I lived with' so you can kind of get disconnected from that.
But really it's about - kind of - acting responsibly and being able to show a track record of borrowing
reasonable amounts of money and paying it back and acting responsibly.
There can be lots of problems with your credit file -- I think this is one thing about using
planning ahead is when you think you're going to even start looking in the near future,
it's just to get a copy of your report. It does cost £2 and -you know- hopefully it'll
be absolutely fine, there'll be nothing you don't recognise on there, but I don't know
the actual facts, but so many people find something -- like you say -- they might have
flat shared somewhere or there might be something on there, or you didn't pay a full catalogue
bill -- you might have two pence left on there and if you look at it far enough in advance
then you've got the time to sort it out. Even if it was a genuine mistake, you can pay it
off, but sometimes you can leave a note on the file to explain: look, this was a two
pence debt I owed -- this is the reason, because then a lender will look at it and say 'ah-
okay, so this is a bad mark but this is the reason'. Now, I don't know if they'll look
past that but at least you can put a small explanation on there to say, you know, this
was a genuine mistake.