Is the mortgage market turbulence getting you down? Have you got a mortgage-related question you need answering? Email in, and we will get one of our experts to reply. Nick Mendes, mortgage technical manager at John Charcol, has given his advice to a reader below. If you have a question for our experts, email us at money@theipaper.com.
Question: My partner and I had an offer accepted on a new house and were partway through selling our own when the mortgage came unstuck. Two lenders turned us down. One flagged a financial association with my ex-husband, who was made bankrupt without my knowledge, from a joint account we closed years ago. The other declined me over some modest betting transactions on my bank statements, even though I have never missed a payment or gone overdrawn. We now have a buyer and a purchase lined up and are worried the whole chain could collapse. What is a financial association, how do I get rid of it, and is gambling on a statement enough to sink an application when nothing else is wrong?
Answer: I am sorry you have hit this so late in the process, with a chain already depending on it, but neither problem is unusual and there is a clear route through both.Take the financial association first. Whenever you open a joint account, or in some cases a joint mortgage or loan, the credit reference agencies, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, link your credit file to whoever you held that account with.
