Clean Slate Mortgages has been created especially to help those people who are unable to get a mortgage or remortgage from a traditional high street lender, due to previous credit problems, mortgage arrears, defaults, or County Court Judgement (CCJs).

If you have been turned down for a mortgage by a mainstream bank or building society, we can help you. Through our links with specialist adverse credit and bad credit mortgage advisers, we are able to help source mortgages for people with:

• Bad Debts
• Credit Problems
• Defaults
• Mortgage Arrears
• County Court Judgements
• Individual Voluntary Agreements
• Bankruptcy

Traditional lenders still work to very rigid guidelines when deciding whether to approve a mortgage or remortgage. If you have a poor credit history, CCJs, IVAs, or arrears, your chances of obtaining a mortgage or remortgage from one of these lenders is extremely slim.

A bad credit history can be caused by a number of different factors. Quite often, circumstances beyond your control can be the cause. For example, your regular overtime may have been cut, meaning you had insufficient income to meet repayments on loans or credit cards. Or perhaps you were made redundant and this caused you to fall behind with your mortgage repayments.

Any previous credit problems such as these can cause a mainstream lender to reject your mortgage or remortgage application, even though the situation may have been brought on through no fault of your own. This can be the case even if you your debts are now cleared, because the arrears will still be recorded on your credit file which lenders will see when they process your mortgage or remortgage application.

But there are an increasing number of specialist lenders who don’t take such a harsh view of people with a less than perfect credit record. They are known as “sub-prime” mortgage lenders.

Sub-prime mortgage lenders deal with two groups of borrowers – those with a poor credit history (such as mortgage arrears, CCJs, and other bad debts) and those who are self-employed and cannot prove their income.

The interest rates charged by sub-prime lenders are usually a little higher than those available to people with a clean credit record. However, increased competition (in 2002, one in four UK mortgages was classed as sub-prime) means the rates are nowhere near as bad as they were a few years ago.

But remember that, having obtained a mortgage or remortgage from a specialist sub-prime lender, within a few years you will have established a good credit history, assuming you make all your mortgage repayments on time. At that point, you can (with our help, of course) look again at your mortgage options, and hopefully be in a position to remortgage to a mainstream lender on a more competitive mortgage interest rate.