I didn’t ring on Monday. I spent a week researching bad credit mortgages instead.

This is a composite of conversations we have most weeks, written up as one story. Details have been changed. It is a personal account, not mortgage advice.

The short version, for anyone who does not want to read a week of my life. Missed payments stay on your credit file for six years, and the six years runs from the date the payment was missed, not from the date you cleared the balance. There is no single credit score: the three UK credit reference agencies each produce a different number, and lenders do not use any of them, they score you against their own rules. A missed payment is the mildest form of adverse credit there is, well below a default, a CCJ, an IVA or bankruptcy. And many of the lenders most likely to accept adverse credit do not deal with the public at all, only through brokers.

That last one is why a week of research got me exactly nowhere.

I didn’t ring on Monday.

I know. I said I would.

Here’s why.

Standing in that bank on the Thursday, when my banker started talking about my “conduct history”, I realised I didn’t properly understand a single thing that was happening to me. I just sat there nodding at a man I’ve known for 7 years while he explained, kindly, that I was a risk.

I wasn’t doing that again.

So instead of ringing anybody, I spent a week trying to understand what’s actually wrong with me on paper.

I’ve learned more in seven days than I did in seven years of banking with the same branch.

There isn’t one credit score

I signed up to check my file properly and got three different numbers from three different companies. Experian, Equifax, TransUnion. Three scores, all different, and one of them was nearly 200 points off another.

I’d been treating the number in that free app on my phone like it was my exam result.

Turns out lenders don’t even see it. They each have their own scoring system, run on their own rules, and my number is basically a rough guess sold back to me.

A week ago I’d have told you my score was my problem. It isn’t. It was never the thing.

Not all bad credit is the same bad credit

This one actually cheered me up.

There’s a hierarchy to it, and each step down is a bigger deal to a lender than the one above:

Mine are late payments. Two of them.

Which, in the grand scheme of what can be on a credit file, is about as mild as it gets.

I sat at the kitchen table reading that and felt genuinely furious for about ten minutes. Not sad. Furious. Because nobody in that branch had thought to say “for what it’s worth, this is the mildest version of this problem”. I’d walked out of there thinking I was radioactive.

How long do missed payments stay on your credit file?

Six years.

That’s the bit most people know, including me.

Here’s the bit I didn’t: the six years runs from when the payment was missed, not from when you paid it off.

I’d been quietly proud of clearing that card. Turns out clearing it didn’t restart anything, or reset anything, or wipe anything. It just meant the debt was gone. The record stayed exactly where it was, with the same expiry date it always had.

So my two missed payments from 2024 are on my file until 2030 whatever I do, and the only thing that changes between now and then is how much weight a lender puts on them. Which apparently drops off a lot faster than the six years suggests.

Nobody tells you that either.

The one website that actually helped

Somewhere around day three of reading adverts pretending to be articles, I found MoneyHelper.

It’s free and it’s impartial and it’s backed by the government, and I want to be clear about why that mattered so much to me: there was nothing on it trying to sell me anything.

After a week of “guaranteed approval” banners, reading something written by people with no commission riding on my decision felt like sitting down.

I read it for about two hours. I now know what adverse credit means, which is just the industry’s polite phrase for a blemish on your file. I know what loan to value means, and that my 10% deposit puts me at 90% LTV, and that this matters more than I’d realised. I know “specialist lender” isn’t a euphemism for loan shark.

For the first time since December I understood the words being used about me.

Where the research runs out

And then I hit the wall.

Because MoneyHelper explains how the system works. It’s guidance. What it can’t do, and it’s upfront about this, is tell me which specific lender will say yes to a bloke with a 10% deposit and two late payments from 2024.

Nothing free will tell you that. I’ve looked.

And I understand why now. Telling somebody which mortgage to apply for is regulated advice, and you can’t hand that out on a web page to a stranger whose circumstances you’ve never seen.

So a week of homework has left me here:

I understand the game.

I still can’t play it.

The lenders I need can’t be reached by me

Because the last thing I found is the bit that properly stopped me.

A lot of the lenders that deal with credit files like mine don’t sell to the public. You can’t walk into a branch, because there is no branch. You can’t apply on their website, because their website is for brokers. They’re what the industry calls intermediary only, which means the only door in is through somebody who is registered to use it.

I could research for another six months and I still wouldn’t be able to reach them.

Which is a strange feeling. I did all this reading to avoid needing anybody, and the reading is what proved I need somebody.

Does applying for a mortgage affect your credit score?

There’s one more thing I found out and I wish I hadn’t.

Those three applications I fired off in a panic the night I got declined? Each one left a hard search on my file, which is the record of a formal credit application, and other lenders can see them.

Three applications, three declines, three footprints, all in one evening.

Checking your own report doesn’t do this. Getting a quote usually doesn’t either, because that’s normally a soft search that only you can see. Applying does.

I was trying to fix it. I made it worse. I’d love to say I’d have known better, but I wouldn’t, because nobody had ever explained the difference.

The five questions I’ve written down

Anyway.

The envelope is still on the kitchen table. Her number’s still on the back of it.

But it’s covered in my handwriting now, because I’ve written down what I actually want to ask:

1. How much damage did those three applications do, and how long until it stops mattering?
2. Are two late payments from 2024 something a lender will overlook, or something I have to wait out?
3. Is my 10% deposit enough for the sort of lender that would consider me, or do I need more?
4. What does it cost me to find out?
5. And the real one, the one I’ll probably ask badly: am I actually stuck, or have I just been knocking on the wrong door?

I’m ringing her tomorrow.

Part one: I was declined for a mortgage by the bank I had used for 7 years Part three: I rang the number on the envelope

I rang the number on the envelope

This is a composite of conversations we have most weeks, written up as one story. Details have been changed. It is a personal account, not mortgage advice.

The short version. After four declines in a fortnight I rang a specialist bad credit mortgage broker in Essex, expecting to be turned down politely. She did not ask about the house. She asked what happened. Two missed payments from 2024 turned out to be the mildest thing on her list rather than the end of the road, my three panic applications mattered but were not fatal, and my 10% deposit narrowed the field without closing it. She told me to stop applying, told me one lender would definitely say no, and refused to promise me a yes. I have not got a mortgage. For the first time since December I know what the next step is.

I rang at twenty to ten on the Tuesday morning.

That was the third attempt. The first two times I got as far as her name on the screen and put the phone face down on the table.

Ridiculous. I’m a grown man with a 10% deposit and I was frightened of a phone call.

But by then I’d had four nos in a fortnight, three of them my own fault, and I honestly thought I was ringing up to be told the same thing in a nicer voice.

Before I rang, I checked whether I was a customer or a search term

Before I rang I did what I’ve done with everybody this month. Checked the register. Then I sat and read the About page on her website properly, start to finish, looking for the catch.

You know the sort of thing I was looking for. The guaranteed approval line. The countdown timer. The bit where you have to hand over your details before anybody will tell you anything.

It wasn’t there.

Then I went and found her page on bad credit mortgages, because there was one question I wanted answered before I spoke to a human being.

Was I an actual customer, or was I just a search term?

I’d worked out by then that a lot of these websites have a bad credit page for the same reason they have a contact form. It’s there because people type it in at 1am, not because anybody behind it knows what to do with you.

Hers listed what she deals with. Defaults. CCJs. Debt management plans. IVAs. Bankruptcy. Low credit scores. Self employed income.

And I read down that list and realised something that should have occurred to me five weeks earlier.

Two missed payments isn’t the hard end of it.

It’s the top of the list. The easy end. I’d spent a month thinking of myself as a lost cause, and in her world I was a Tuesday morning.

Two other things on that site I hadn’t expected, either.

The first is that her name is Angela Little. A Little Mortgage Advice. It’s her surname.

I sat at the kitchen table and actually laughed. First time in a month. There’s something about a business named after a small pun rather than a promise that made me trust it more than any of the banners had.

The second was the one that got me to pick the phone up.

She’d spent her entire career at the two biggest specialist mortgage brokerages in the country before she started her own. Specialist. Meaning the messy end. Meaning people like me, for years, as a full time job.

My banker of 7 years has spent his career selling mortgages to people who don’t have anything on their file. That is not the same skill.

She answered on the second ring

So I rang.

She answered.

Not a menu. Not hold music. Not “your call is important to us”. A person, on the second ring, saying her own name.

After a month of automated declines that on its own nearly finished me off.

I had my five questions written on the back of an envelope in front of me. I’d rehearsed them. I got about halfway through the first one before I realised she wasn’t going to do it in my order.

Because the first thing she asked me wasn’t what house I wanted, or how much I’d saved, or what my score was.

She asked me what happened.

So I told her. The card, the two missed payments in 2024, the Thursday in December, my banker of 7 years, the three applications I fired off that night like an idiot. All of it.

And I waited for the sharp intake of breath.

“You haven’t been refused a mortgage. You’ve been refused by one lender.”

It never came.

She said: “Nothing on here surprises me. Honestly. Nothing. Everybody’s got something.”

Then she said the thing I’ve since repeated to about four different people:

“You haven’t been refused a mortgage. You’ve been refused by one lender. That’s not the same thing.”

I’d spent a month treating my bank’s decision as the industry’s verdict on me.

Turns out it was one company’s opinion, generated by a computer, using rules that company wrote for itself.

Then she went through my five questions properly. Not vaguely. She answered them, and where the answer was bad news she gave me the bad news first.

The three panic applications. They do count against me, and she wanted the exact dates, which I hadn’t thought would matter. Not fatal. But she was clear that the reason she wanted the dates was to work out the right moment to apply, not to make me feel worse about it.

The two missed payments. She agreed with what I’d worked out during my week at the kitchen table. It’s the mildest tier of adverse credit there is, and there are lenders who care far more about the last two years than about 2024. She described the sort of lender she had in mind. I’d never heard of them, which by that point I’d stopped finding surprising.

My 10% deposit. Honest answer: it works with some of them and not others, and more deposit would widen the field. She didn’t pretend 10% was ideal. She didn’t tell me to go away and save for another two years either.

What it costs me. She told me exactly what happens on the money side, and when, before I’d finished asking. No dancing round it. I’d braced myself for a “let’s come back to that” and it didn’t come.

Am I stuck. She said no. Then she said something I wasn’t expecting, which is that the most useful thing I could do that week was nothing at all.

The most useful thing I could do was stop applying

Stop applying. Completely. Every application I make on my own makes the next one harder, and I’ve already burned three.

Then she told me one lender would definitely turn me down, and that we weren’t going to waste a search on them.

That’s the bit that properly landed. Not the encouragement. The fact she was willing to tell me a door was shut. Everything else I’d read in January told me every door was open, which is exactly how I knew none of it was true.

She also said that if she couldn’t help me straight away, she’d tell me exactly what I needed to do so that she could help me later.

Which is a strange thing to say when you’re trying to win somebody’s business.

What she wouldn’t do

She didn’t tell me I’d get a mortgage.

Not once. I asked her twice, in slightly different words, because I badly wanted somebody to just say it.

She wouldn’t. What she said was that she wasn’t going to promise me a yes on a first phone call, but she would tell me exactly what a yes needs.

After a month of guaranteed approvals from strangers, that was the most reassuring thing anybody had said to me.

What happens next

She’s asked for my payslips, my bank statements, and the full credit report I’d already pulled during my week of homework.

That last bit gave me a small and slightly pathetic amount of pleasure. She said most people come to that first call not knowing what’s on their own file, and turning up with it saves a fortnight.

So the research wasn’t wasted. It just wasn’t enough on its own, which is a different thing.

I haven’t got a mortgage.

I want to be careful about that, because I know somebody’s going to read this on their phone in a car park somewhere. I have not been approved. Nothing has been agreed. There’s a real chance this still doesn’t work out.

But it’s the 20th of January, and for the first time since the 14th of December I know what the next step is, who’s doing it, and roughly how long it takes.

I don’t think I’d understood how much of the last month was the not knowing rather than the being declined.

Anyway.

The envelope’s in the recycling.

Twenty minutes up the road, as it turns out. All that time on Google at 1am, and she was twenty minutes up the road.

I’ll let you know what comes back.

Part one: I was declined for a mortgage by the bank I had used for 7 years Part two: How long do missed payments stay on your credit file?

What people ask before they ring

Can I get a mortgage with missed payments on my credit file? Often, yes. A missed or late payment is the mildest form of adverse credit, and many lenders weigh the last two years of conduct far more heavily than older markers. The deciding factors are usually how recent the missed payments are, how many there are, your deposit and your affordability.

Do mortgage brokers help with bad credit? A specialist broker’s value is knowing which lenders’ criteria match your circumstances before an application is made, which avoids the declines that damage your file further. Many lenders who accept adverse credit are intermediary only, meaning they take business through registered brokers rather than directly from the public.

Will speaking to a broker hurt my credit file? An initial conversation about your circumstances does not put a hard search on your file. A formal application does, which is why a broker will usually want to establish the right lender before anything is submitted.

How long should I wait after being declined? There is no fixed waiting period, and waiting is not automatically the answer. What matters is understanding why you were declined and applying next to a lender whose criteria fit. Sometimes that means acting now with a different lender, sometimes it means a few months of preparation first.

Do I have to wait six years for missed payments to drop off? No. Missed payments stay on a credit file for six years from the date they were missed, but plenty of lenders will consider an application well before they expire.

If you’re four nos deep and you’ve stopped opening the emails, this is the conversation. Angela Little is a specialist bad credit mortgage broker in Benfleet, Essex, covering the whole of Essex and beyond. Free quote, no obligation, no pressure to proceed. Start your journey, or ring 01268 387898 and just say what happened.

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