Mortgage repayment problems. Is honest the best policy?

I have a mortgage with the Bank of Scotland and I am having some trouble making repayments. I am wondering if on this occasion honesty is the best policy with regard to disclosing my currently very poor financial situation.

The reason I ask this is because on two previous occasions when I've been honest with banks (Abbey and HSBC) they've basically screwed me over to get their money back ASAP and I cannot afford to be screwed out of my family home.

Has anyone else had dealings with the Bank of Scotland in these sort of matters? Stupid thing is that I'm self-employed and five days work would clear all my arrears and get me up to date but I cannot guarantee when that work is going to come in...

Regards, Jason.

The best place for debt advice is . Some of the posters may well have experience of BoS and be able to tell you how they react.

Daytona

Yes you can, there are plenty of part time jobs at the moment for the Xmas season, go work in a restaurant or bar for a couple of months.

In message , Jason Arthurs writes

Cant answer the question but agree about banks screwing you if you need their help and are up front with them. Cant speak for Bank of Scotland though. Nat West tend to give me what I want when they find that I can get it elsewhere.

Given that it is the roof over your head, and the last thing you can lose, and that it seems like a short term problem, I would tend to rob Peter to pay Paul for a while.

Have you thought about converting the loan to interest only, (unless it already is).

"Tumbleweed" wrote

How can you be sure that "a couple of months of casual work" will pay as much as "five days of [unspecified] self-employed work"?

A "couple of months" is about 40-50 days; if the self-employed work pays

60ph (for instance) but the casual work is 5ph then he'd need to work 60 days casual work - which is going to be over 2 months.

Anyway, where will there be Xmas jobs still around in early February (ie in a couple of months' time)?

Go to a loan shark?

More seriously, I guess he could, given suitable equity and an as yet unblemished payment record, ask his existing lender for a further advance on his mortgage, for "home improvements", and then use the money as a cushion instead.

Some lenders' products include the option of taking a "payment holiday" and it's worth exploring this. It might be prudent to keep quiet about the cashflow problem and hint that you want to divert some cashflow temporarily to fund a holiday.

These are all just stop-gap measures and not to be undertaken unless there is genuine confidence that the gap can in fact be stopped. Think hard about the likelihood, even when the current shortage of work ends, that it might return.

Well lets have the OP say just how much money he needs. I'm guessing its less than 2k but suppose its 3k, that is money that can realistically be earnt pretty quickly. My kids have earnt 1k in a month working part time. There is a book store near me offering sales assistant work at 7.50/hr. He could geta cuple of jobs, after all he's not employed at present so whats to lose?

One of my kids has a job working in a store in the sales period after Xmas, throughout jan. Will there be pub jobs and restarant jobs in Feb? Dunno, must be some going, and starting now would put you in pole position for those. Anyway my point was, maybe the OP should stop thinking 'my job is X and therefore if I cant do X I wont get any money and will lose my house', and instead think 'while I am waiting for X to occur, I'll look at the rest of the job alphabet and take whatevers going rather than lose my house'.