Friday, 25 April 2014

Mortgage applicants face new rules

A mortgage lending clampdown comes into force tomorrow which will see lenders delve more deeply into people's personal lives, from their plans for parenthood to how they will spend their old age.

The industry-wide changes affect home buyers and people looking to re-mortgage and they will mean that lenders have to take a much stronger interest in people's spending habits and how their life plans could affect their ability to meet their repayments.

Mortgage applicants will need to sit through longer interviews, provide more paperwork to back up what they are saying and could find themselves taken aback by the probing nature of some of the questions they will be asked.

I understand that maybe the industry body would like to tighten up the rules a little to stop people borrowing more than they can afford to pay back, but it sounds like anyone from Saturday who wants a mortgage will have to sit through a Spanish Inquisition.

Worse than that is there will be a load of hypothetical questions about your personal life that you might not have thought about or be in a position to answer and yet what you say could determine whether or not you get a mortgage or not, that’s ridiculous.

Imagine someone whose 35 and they go in and ask for a mortgage and they get asked what do you plan to do when you retire? And they answer I haven’t thought about that yet, what does that mean no mortgage?


Instead of bringing in these excessive and unnecessary changes wouldn’t it have been better if they had just enforced the old rules properly, that’s all it would have taken!

No comments:

Post a Comment