While you’re in discovery mode for buying a new property, now is a great time to order a free copy of your credit report.
You can do this once a year without cost and most of the time it won’t show up anything to be concerned about – but on the off chance there’s something there we need to deal with – best we know it now rather than later on!
There are two main organisations for this and we typically recommend you get a copy of each report (different banks use different providers and we’ve had instances in the past where someone has a clean report on one, but a default showing on the other).
The two major organisations are called Equifax and Dunn and Bradstreet. If you google each one both have a free option and the reports typically take 10-14 days to arrive to you. You can then open them with a password, typical your date of birth. Please forward a copy to your broker when you’ve obtained it.
Bear in mind – any credit enquiry you make will show on there, and if it shows, we should “mitigate it” with the bank – i.e. cover it in our notes, explain what it was for, did you take out the credit, do you still have it. So have a look through and send your broker a list of this information so we can add it to your file for when you’re ready to make a submission.
This is also a great time to remember that if you’re thinking of buying – you want as little credit enquiries on your file as possible. So if your bank send you a credit increase – say no and opt out of further ones. If you go to Harvey Norman and decide to get something on interest free – talk to me first before you get approved. Basically the more boring you can be in terms of credit right now, the better it’ll be for you.