No, no no no. Not at all, this is utter bollocks and shows her lack of genuine understanding & experience & tbh it's probably more damaging for low income families to say this tit rather than empowering people to try to manage their credit profiles well?? Your credit rating doesn't really matter in this country as each bureau calculates it differently & each lender has diff criteria, but your report is basically a 6-year view back (outside of anything mega like a bankruptcy) and her benefits history is so far in the past, it won't even be contained within that. Obviously if she was still paying down a huge credit card or loan, it would report on that, but if you've got money for Cotswold Company & multiple phones then that stuff should all be handled years ago now so would have very little impact? You can build good credit from negative/nothing in a few years easy.Moreover, if you combined the cost of all the Cotsworld sideboards, extra iPhones, Dyson fans and so forth, she probably would be about 1/3 of the way to a 10% deposit for a 2 bedroom flat somewhere. She could even use help to buy/first time buyer schemes. My friend recently bought a lovely house where the council own 30% of it (and she and her partner are salaried at around £20k p/a each).
I've not been on benefits myself but I'm genuinely curious if this would impact your credit rating to the extent JM says - i.e. she can't get a mortgage? She never talks about being in debt when she went through poverty, just about having no ingoings. I may be totally wrong here, but just wondering.
If she claims it's because of her haphazard income streams that's also a lie, I'm happy to go into edge case lending if it's relevant to anyone cos we went through that hell ourselves (it's not that bad tbh, like I clocked how privilege is SO real when it comes to money going through that whole process). But fundamentally she's clearly incapable of budgeting or saving for anything, probs waiting to inherit the empire init !