Buying a house is one of the most stressful things you can do. You spend weeks looking for the right house, making sure your family like it and that everything will fit; only to find you haven’t thought about how you’re going to pay for it. The housing and mortgage market is one of the most complicated markets there is from the outside. There are hundreds of types of mortgages with thousands of providers all buying for your attention. In fact before I was even considering buying a house I felt as if I was surrounded by mortgage advice and offers.

But I found once you’ve actually looked into it, it’s not that confusing. Especially for me as I don’t have a brilliant credit rating. I became a father at a very young age. When I turned 18 the banks through credit at me, I accepted it, and a few years down the line I was in trouble and thought I would never get a mortgage in a million years but after speaking to a friend they said that companies do bad credit mortgages which help people that don’t have a great credit rating but do have a steady income. So I thought I would look into it.

I did some research on the internet and looked at some different products available. A lot of providers now classify if it suitable for people with ‘Bad Credit’ so the market is instantly simplified because there are lots of places you cannot look. But there is still choice out there depending on how you want to play the mortgage game. Do you want to pay the lowest interest rate every time or would you rather security in knowing what you are going to be paying each month? Did I want to go with a bank or a small building society? There is even purely internet based ones too.

I spoke to a couple of lenders and the products they offered me were brilliant. They were all bad credit mortgages but what else was I to expect? I got a similar service to everyone else I just had a higher mortgage rate than someone with a better credit rating. But I was shocked at what I could have and with so many different providers. They were lovely and did not judge the fact that I had a poor credit rating.

They understood that I had mishandled money early in my life and that I now had a steady, dependable wage that would support a mortgage well. Mainly because I had been paying rent on time for the last 6 years without a problem. So we discussed my options looked at how long I needed the mortgage for, how much I could pay each month and ultimately what type of house I could buy for me and my family. The mortgage rates were better than I was expecting for a bad credit mortgage. In the end everything was sorted out. Me and my family moved in to our new home and I’m paying less a month than I did in rent!