They say that honesty is the best policy. For Finance Advice Centre customer Richard Kemp it almost proved disastrous when it came to moving his family out of their cramped one-bedroom home and into a three-bedroom house.

Served with a County Court Judgment in 2005, Richard and his wife Colette knew that enough time had passed for the record of the CCJ to have fallen off their credit score.

They’d been paying off a mortgage on their property for 13 years and had never defaulted. So when they looked to move home and borrow the £85,000 they needed to make the purchase they decided it was best to come clean.

“I know that your record for a CCJ lapses after six years. But we were concerned that when lenders did their searches into our credit history they would find out about it. So we decided it would be best to bring it up,” he said.

“We told our estate agent’s in-house adviser that we had a bit of debt and that we’d had a CCJ, but he told us that because of that he couldn’t help us get the full amount that we needed.

“Then we decided to go to the bank who we had our first mortgage with and, even though we’d never defaulted, they said that they couldn’t help us either. We understood their reasons, but we were at our wits’ ends.”

The best offer the Kemps had been made was for a loan worth ÂŁ30,000, way below the ÂŁ85,000 they needed to borrow.

By then they had already set their hearts on moving into a three-bedroom semi-detached property elsewhere in their hometown of Batley, West Yorkshire, but were now facing the prospect of having to find another, smaller, home – or not moving at all.

Richard said: “Our house at the time was too small, our nine-year-old daughter, Lindsay, needed her own bedroom and the three-bedroom property was perfect. I then decided to Google ‘mortgages for people with CCJs’ and a link to Finance Advice Centre came up.

“I said to Colette why don’t we try it? We were in the last chance saloon, really, so we decided to go for it.”

The couple met with our adviser, Dave Moore, and explained their situation and what they were looking to borrow. Two weeks later, Dave got in touch with the good news – he had found a lender willing to give them the mortgage that they were looking for.

“What was amazing was that we recognised the company’s logo,” said Richard, “because our original adviser had already gone to them and said that they couldn’t help us.

“After finding the house we wanted in September, we finally moved in during January this year.

“Looking back, I was surprised that we’d struggled to get a deal with the other people. Although by then we were prepared to borrow less, we were extremely relieved when Finance Advice Centre managed to get us the whole figure.”

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