Your Mobile Phone Could Stop You Getting A Mortgage.

Have you closed a mobile phone account with a payment outstanding ? It could come back to haunt you.

Missing a payment for a bill as trivial as your mobile phone contract can have a detrimental effect on your credit file, and will remain on your report for 3 years. Even if this is just an oversight, not staying on top of your finances can result in defaults being recorded against your credit file.

Worse still, if you close the account while the missed payment is outstanding,  it will remain on your credit report for 6 years.

With so many people experiencing debt management problems, mortgage companies are becoming more selective as to whom they lend money. 

Something like this happened to me. I was a few months into a 12 month cable TV contact when I was offered a job abroad. I incorrectly thought that just because I was not longer using a service, I did not need to honour the contract. When this was explained to me, I thought sod you, try chasing payment when I’m living in Italy. What could they do and what they did was report my non payment of contractual payments to the credit reference agencies. Four years later, when told a mortgage application had been turned down due to defaults on my credit report, I was at a loss as to whom it could be. In hindsight, I would have been better to pay up the outstanding contract.

The lesson to be learnt here is that even if the outstanding amount is too trival for the company in question to chase payment to no more than a couple of letters, they will inform the credit reference agencies. You may think you’ve got away with it until you apply for a mortgage and find out your are declined.

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