Finances boydens.co.uk 19 Having been in the corporate world for this long and having worked directly for lenders for another five years prior to this, there were a lot of working practices that I have taken from these roles into my own business, but the big driver in setting this up was having my own ideas and opinions on ways of working. At the start of 2021, I was joined by a personal friend and former colleague of mine, which has been great and incorporating a second advisor into the business has been made a lot easier for us this year by a busy housing market. Lockdown woes Initially, however, as the pandemic struck, like many others we didn’t see this as presenting an opportunity for us ahead! When the first lockdown was implemented, the entire economy ground to a halt and that of course meant that I could not trade also. As with anyone that was selfemployed, it became quite a scary time for me personally, and although I have always been set up to work from home if needed, my clients were not able to leave their homes to view properties, and valuers were unable to go out in order to assess properties. The market was effectively closed, and I found my role change overnight. Instead of looking to help to save clients’ money, overcome certain criteria or just to make lives easier by arranging mortgages for their purchases and remortgages, I had become a point of contact for my clients who were facing harder times and had become genuinely concerned about their financial circumstances. Unfortunately, some of my clients did lose jobs, or were unable to go out to work where they were selfemployed, and a lot were placed on furlough meaning that their income was temporarily reduced. Payment holidays The great thing that did come in very early was the opportunity for mortgage borrowers to apply for payment holidays from their lenders without this having an impact on their credit score. The process in applying for this was made quite easy with most lenders, who set up systems quickly to enable their borrowers to log on and request a payment holiday online. Once approved, they could then have a few months without needing to make their mortgage payments, the interest of which would then be spread across their remaining mortgage term once repayments started again. I feel that this halted a lot of panic and was quite refreshing to see in such a time of uncertainty. Uncertain times Although support for current borrowers was good to see in the early stages of the pandemic, new purchasers were somewhat neglected as mortgage schemes were removed en masse. It was clear that the effects of Covid were unknown and, in my opinion, as lenders struggled to forecast what would happen to house prices in an environment where there was a potential of future mass unemployment, they really tightened the purse strings, removing any borrowing with a higher element of risk, which meant withdrawals of all schemes across the higher loan to values.
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