But again, that’s not a gold standard or an agreed metric.
For a while Credit Karma was telling me that I didn’t have enough available credit ( under £20k) but some might see having £20k available as a risk as I could max them out and not be able to afford my mortgage.
In the same way it tells me that my utilisation is too high, but who is the standard or what is too high? “Try this trick and get a new card, go from 30% to 10% AND increase your available credit” Monzo might not want to take the risk if it’s above 10% but PayDayLoans4Me might accept me at 95%
I wouldn’t take any of it as gospel. Get the ticks for things like electoral roll and not missing payments, after that it’s about being sensible. They want me to increase my available credit because they’ll get a kickback if I open a credit card after clicking through them.
Just received the email. A bit bummed tbh. I tend to use Flex for bigger purchases and always select the longest term because I usually pay stuff off within 3-4 months anyway. I like the security of the longer terms in case I can’t afford to pay off extra for a month or 2. I don’t mind paying interest since it’s usually not that much if I pay it off a lot sooner.
I ended up using the Barclays Finance last night as I didn’t think I’d get the 24 month option so soon. I messaged Monzo support and they said that not everyone would be offered/eligible for the 24 month option. So I just decided to bite the bullet and use the finance option.
That’s what I’ll be doing, I’ll be paying half of it off before Christmas and making extra payments the following months. Just as I mentioned, didn’t want to take the hit to my credit report if I could avoid it.
We have a couple more Flex updates that we’d love your help to test before we roll out to all Flex users
As Flex is a credit product and this post will likely be seen by people that don’t have Flex yet, here’s what you need to know:
Not everyone will be eligible for Flex. We will run a soft credit search to assess if you’re eligible, and a hard search if you open Flex.
As a minimum, you’ll have to be over 18 and a UK resident. The representative APR for Flex is 29% APR. Ts&Cs apply.
If you miss a payment this may negatively impact your credit score.
Edit your next monthly payment
We’re making it easier to change your next monthly payment. Use the slider to choose how much you want to pay - whether more or less than your planned payment - and we’ll do the rest. We’ll work out which purchases to change in order to save you the most interest.
Before you confirm the change, we’ll:
be clear how it impacts the interest you pay - whether it’s increasing, decreasing or staying the same
show you how it’s impacted future monthly payments
We’re testing this with lighter users of Flex as we collect learnings and optimise customer experience. This means if you have a lot of flex purchases we might not be able to roll it out to you just yet.
Changing how we handle holds for hotels and hire cars
We’re excited to say we’re also improving how we handle holds. Going forward, we’ll treat holds for hotels and hire cars like all other credit cards. We won’t charge you anything (and you won’t need to pick a plan) until the merchant takes a payment. We’ll send you a notification when the hold is placed on your account, and again when it’s released or charged.
We’re planning to test Edit Monthly Payment next week, and holds will follow in a couple of weeks. I’ve set up one form which I’ll use to give you access to both features when they’re ready. Fill it out by Friday 3rd November, and I’ll let you know in this thread when we’ve activated the features on your accounts.
@Carlo1460@ndrw yep, we’re using Merchant Category Codes / MCC. We think we’ve identified all that use holds, but if you spot anything that’s not being tagged as a hold let us know and we’ll look in to it.
Not sure I’d appreciate two notifications every time I made a purchase, or for something over £££.
Or, I buy AirPods from Apple (MCC electrical retailer or something):
notification for pending
notification a day to two later collected
Does the same thing then happen for everything I buy from Curry’s
At a guess it’s easier to go by merchant category for now, then brand/merchant specific later, or some other way to recognise holds vs purchases, though I’m sure someone has mentioned before that there’s no way to differentiate.
across credit accounts is all that’s really needed.
