How about a horror story for winter? It goes like this: it’s the middle of winter, the weather is spitefully frosty and you wake up to find you have no hot water or heating. An emergency gas engineer breaks the news you’ve been dreading: your aging gas boiler has given up the ghost and is no longer safe to use. You urgently need a new one.
To make things worse, you’re a single parent with two young children to keep warm. In addition, you’ve recently been turned down for a small loan. The last thing you want to do now is apply for borrowing again. You’re sure it’ll simply dent your credit rating even further and result in another refusal.
This is exactly the situation supply teacher Holly (not her real name of course) found herself in last year, just after the expenditure of Christmas when her current account was virtually running on fumes and her meagre savings had largely vanished in the name of the Happiest Day of the Year. It’s tough being a single parent that freelances; as Holly knew well after being deserted by the boys’ father a couple of years previously. Normally, she enjoys the flexibility, variety and freedom that supply teaching brings her but in the bleak midwinter, a broken boiler was the last thing she needed.
Although her parents had been a lifeline, both for emergency cash and childcare, she couldn’t expect them to fork out on the eye-watering cost of buying and a new boiler and having it installed, estimated at around £2,000. As many people do when they find themselves financially lodged between a rock and a hard place, Holly began exploring online what other borrowing options might be available to her. And frankly, it was a dismal experience. She’d heard that new forms of finance were available from numerous peer-to-peer lender platforms in the UK but when she looked closer into their offerings she realised that they all required unblemished credit histories, something that Holly simply wasn’t able to provide. She’d run into arrears with her mortgage repayments and was still climbing out of that particular hole. Although she was making steady (but slow) progress, she was certain it would show up on a credit search.
That was when she stumbled upon Unbolted. When she read that our customers’ creditworthiness is irrelevant to our pool of lenders because we collateralise valuable assets our applicants own (we offer secured asset loans, in other words), her spirits started to lift. Moreover, when she looked at the list of items we consider for collateralisation – gold, silver, diamonds, jewellery, fine wines, rare books and manuscripts, classic cars, musical instruments –even luxury handbags – they started to soar. Because Holly owned a gorgeous, authentic Bottega Veneta snakeskin shoulder bag, bought for her in happier (and more lucrative) times by her former partner.
Once our expert partners had authenticated it and determined its resale value on the secondary market, we were able to offer Holly the money she needed for her new boiler, holding the bag in safe and secure storage as security against the loan. Within six months, she’d repaid the loan and was reunited with her fabulous bag. And all without the faintest hint of a credit search.
