Nat West, playing with people's lives.

“Nat West, playing with people's lives.”

Written on: 02/06/2012 by Foggy71 (1 review written)

We are in the position of having a new build house reserved on a part exchange with our existing property, the mortgage process has been through the developer's chosen mortgage broker with Nat West being the lender. Previously we have tried to sell conventionally but without success. Our financial position is that I am in full time employment with the same employer for the past twenty three years and my wife runs her own beauty therapy business from home. We have a perfect credit record and independently have both had our own previous mortgages for over ten years before meeting each other, neither of us has ever defaulted on a payment.

The property we want to buy is right outside the main gate to my workplace, where we live now is 35 miles away. I'm literally burning over £2000 a year just to get to work. We were initially told that we could have a mortgage of £139000 which was then dropped suddenly to £136000 by NatWest. Fortunately the broker was able to negotiate a price reduction on the property with the developer. Then out of the blue the broker was informed by Nat West that we had to provide proof of zero balances on any credit cards we held. Between us we have three cards, two are mine, one being on zero percent deal with only £125 left it at the the time and the other a Tesco card which I charge up with money at the start of the month and use for fuel and earning clubcard points on the back of that. My wife's card which she uses for her business, fluctuates as she buys stock and pays it off as she works. We jumped through hoops and were forced into our overdraft to clear the balances and were then worried that our overdraft would affect things. We managed to zero our bank account again before the end of the month but it caused a lot of stress and work because Nat West would not accept print out from online without them being validated by the high street branch of our bank. The card providers were not able to give us interim statements as their systems are not geared to do so. The icing on the cake was that there was a stand alone payment required by Nat West but they would not accept a cheque only a credit card payment! Magic! Thanks for that!

Yesterday we were informed after a month of being messed about that Nat West had declined our application. It also turned out that the credit card issue was utter rubbish, zero balances on cards make not difference to a mortgage application. That info came from customer services at NatWest. So somebody wasn't telling the truth at Nat West.

So it appears now that the house that we've already chosen fixtures and fittings for will be lived in by someone else. Totally heart breaking.