Your car agreement is ending and your credit has got worse

£299 to £399

a month, inc VAT

3 months

rental up front

36 months

road tax included

10,000

miles a year

• Three or four years of car payments made on time is the strongest affordability evidence anybody can show, and it is exactly what we look at.
• Start six months before your end date, not six weeks. Nearly everything that goes wrong here is caused by leaving it late.
• If your current car is on PCP and it is worth more than the final payment, that difference can become your three months up front.
• Most cars are between £299 and £399 a month, and you pay the first three months up front.
• We read your bank statements before any credit check, so finding out costs you nothing.

Here is what nobody has explained to you.

Your credit score records the worst of what happened. The redundancy, the divorce, the business that did not make it, the year the arrears built up. It sits there for six years and it does not care what you did next.

What it does not show, in any way an automated system can read, is that you carried on paying for this car. Every month. Through all of it. Thirty six or forty eight payments, on time, while everything else was going wrong.

That is not a small thing. It is a better demonstration that you will pay than almost anything a person with a clean file could put in front of us, because a clean file usually just means nothing difficult has happened yet. Yours means something difficult happened and you paid anyway.

A mainstream leasing company cannot see that. Their model reads the score, takes four seconds, and declines you. We read the bank statements, where those payments are sitting in black and white on every page.

This is the single most useful thing on this page.

Almost everybody in your position leaves it until the end date is close, and that is where it goes wrong. Six weeks is not enough time to be turned down somewhere, work out why, and try a different route. It is enough time to panic and take something expensive.

Six months gives you room to do this properly. It gives you time to get your statements looking their best, to sort out anything on your file that can be sorted, and, if you are in an IVA, to get your Insolvency Practitioner's agreement without everybody rushing.

It also means you never reach the point of having no car. That matters more than it sounds, because the moment you are without transport is the moment your options narrow to whatever you can get today.

Worth being clear about this, because the three main types end very differently and people mix them up.

If you are on PCP. There is an optional final payment, sometimes called a balloon. You have three choices: pay it and keep the car, hand the car back and walk away, or use any equity. Equity is the bit people miss. If the car is worth more than the final payment, that difference is yours, and it can go towards the start of your next agreement.

If you are on hire purchase. Once the last payment and any option to purchase fee are made, the car is yours. You may already own an asset without realising it, which is worth knowing before you decide what to do next.

If you are on a lease or contract hire. The car goes back. There is no final payment and no equity, and the charges to watch are mileage and anything beyond fair wear and tear. Get it inspected or valeted before it goes back rather than after.

In all three cases, check what you owe and what the car is worth before you commit to anything. A five minute valuation can change the whole shape of your options.

We would rather tell you this than have you find out afterwards.

The easiest route, if it works, is your existing finance company. You have paid them faithfully for years and they know that better than anyone. Ring them and ask what they can do.

Often the answer will be no, because their decision runs off the same credit file as everybody else's and yours has changed since they first said yes. But it costs one phone call and it is the simplest option if it happens.

If they say no, that is not a verdict on you. It is a verdict on a system that stopped looking at your payment record the moment it started looking at your score.

Your bank statements come first. Three months of them, plus a copy of your driving licence. Someone at the lender reads them properly and works out whether the payment would sit comfortably alongside everything else that goes out of your account.

In your case that assessment is unusually straightforward, because your current car payment is right there on every statement. We can see exactly what you have been paying, that it has gone out on time, and what is left afterwards. If you are replacing a £280 a month agreement with a £329 one, that is a much easier conversation than starting from nothing.

Nothing touches your credit file at this stage. If the answer is no, you find out with nothing on your file and plenty of time to try elsewhere.

Around £900 to £1,200 to start. The first three months' rental up front. If your current car has equity in it, that can cover some or all of this.

Income from work. £1,500 a month minimum after tax, and realistically £2,000 is where this starts to work properly.

Three months of bank statements, full ones, every page, downloaded as PDFs from your banking app rather than photographed.

A copy of your driving licence, front and back.

Your current agreement up to date. If you have fallen behind on it in the last few months, that is the one thing that undoes the argument this whole page is built on.

Most cars are between £299 and £399 a month, including VAT and road tax. Agreements are typically thirty six months with a ten thousand mile a year limit, and going over costs extra per mile at a rate written into your agreement before you sign.

You will need fully comprehensive insurance, which is not included.

You can see what is available now on the cars page. The list changes regularly.

When we cannot help

• If you have fallen behind on your current car agreement
• If you are behind on other payments right now, or direct debits are bouncing
• If your income is under £1,500 a month after tax, or comes only from benefits
• If you cannot cover the three months up front and there is no equity to draw on
• If you have not yet been discharged from bankruptcy
• If you drive more than 12,000 miles a year

The distinction is the same one this whole site runs on. Trouble that has ended is fine. Trouble that is still running is not.