It is now a good opportunity to look at the state of the secured loan, remortgage and mortgage sectors, as it has now been months since we came out of recession.

Before the recession, there were twenty five secured loan lenders offering a vast variety of loans, and due to the lax citeria then prevalent, almost any homeowner could obtain a secured loan providing that their credit rating was clean and that they had been a homeowner for at least six months.

125% equity plans were available to those residing at their address for at least six months, who had a good credit rating, were in employment where they earned at least 25,000.

An example of this is that if a property was worth 200,000 and the mortgage balance was 190,000, in theory the homeowner could be granted a secured loan of up to 60,000.

At that time these 125% homeowner loans were plentiful as well as popular, as were loan to values of 100%, 110% and 115%

Then even the self employed could obtain a secured loan at up to 90% LTV and they were not even required to provide acounts, and could simply declare their own net profit.

This lead to many of the self employed using self certs to exaggerate their earnings when applying for these loans and this was also the case with remortgage applications.

Most people in those days did in fact remortgage at the end of their tie in mortgage period to get a lower rate of interest or to raise addition funds for a variety of purposes, one of which was for debt consolidation.

With the recession, self certs for secured loans and remortgages were abolished , and loan to values became much tighter.

The number of secured loan lenders fell to only five, and their under writing of those remaining became very restricted especialyy regarding acceptable loan to values.

LTV for the self employed was reduced to only 60% , 10% more than this for employed people.

There are currently bad credit loans available at 50%LTV, where as before the recession loan to values of up to 75% were there.

Matters are now seeing signs of imoprovement for both mortgages remortgages and secured loans with more applications being witnesed for remortgages and mortgages whose rates are at an almost all time low of from only 1.84%

The critera for secured loans has now slackened off a bit with loan to values of up to 85% for the employed and 75% for the self employed.

There are now self employed loans on te market for homeowners self employed for at least six months at an LTV of 60%.

At last the finance world appears to be moving in the right direction.