Neve18

Hey guys, when my partner and I move over we should both have permanent employment as nurses. How long does it take to build up credit history, to the extent that we can buy decent cars, get credit cards etc. We will be taking around $100k, but obviously would like to use that as deposit for house in a year or two. Cheers, Alan

Clappy

It is different in New Zealand than it is in the UK, there has always been less interest in Credit History in New Zealand than there is in the UK.

I suspect that is because the financial system is so much smaller here that it provides fewer opportunities to hide previous bad behaviour but I don't really know the answer.

There might be someone out there with a horror-story but I think that once you have 3-months bank statements showing regular income and the accounts kept in good order then that should be OK provided that you are resident.

I had to provide three months statements to get a mortgage but nothing to get credit cards (although I did have to tell them how many credit cards I already had what the credit limits and what the balances on them were during the application process).

Neve18

That appears relatively painless. I was expecting to be struggling around in an old banger for a year or two. Thanks for the info.😊

escapedtonz

Yeah completely different here.
It's all about a person being able to comfortably service the debt not what your credit history has been. The bank or finance company you use will be keen to know all your incomings and outgoings to calculate if you can afford to make the payments. The calculation they use gets tweaked often and the goalposts do move and they are keen as mustard when they look in to regular payments you have made as they wanna understand the commitments you have.
We walked in to the bank on our first day of arrival to pick up atm cards and were asked if we wanted a credit card each.....didnt even have to ask. We didn't have any commitments so no surprise really. Since then and now having a mortgage it has been mentioned that we may have to reduce our credit card limit to reduce how much we can borrow overall if we wanted to borrow more on the mortgage.
In terms of buying cars, appliances, furniture etc on finance we haven't had any problems whatsoever.
All you have to do is prove your income and be honest with your outgoings so you only borrow what you can afford to repay.

Justcol

Bear in mind a new car in NZ is 8 years old

frstep

So I might actually own a "new" car for the first time in my life :-)

sr71

sr71