Former foster carer wants to provide mortgage services to foster carers
Before becoming a mortgage adviser, Peter Stamford (pictured) was a full-time foster carer for around 10 years.
“Fostering is my family vocation,” he said. “My mum is a foster carer, and so is my sister, so I sort of fell into it, and then fell in love with it.”
So, how did a foster carer become a broker? Stamford told Mortgage Introducer the story of how he got into the business.
Getting into the industry
In 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns came to an end, the Stamford family adopted the three young children they had been caring for, and Peter found himself back on the job market.
“I worked briefly at an airport and for the council, both in customer service, which had always come natural to me,” he related. “But I wanted more, I was used to being self-employed and setting my own schedule.
According to Stamford, one of the most frustrating parts of fostering had been dealing with the mortgage and the issues around using the full fostering allowance as income.
“I was continually unhappy with the levels of knowledge and customer service of advisers when it came time for my remortgage,” he said. “I knew there had to be a better way.
“At the end of 2022, I started studying the CeMAPs, and a few months later, fully qualified, I founded Moor Mortgages.”
Motivations to continue as a broker
“Since launching Moor Mortgages, I have been pestering all the business development managers about how their companies evaluate fostering income,” Stamford said. “It seems absurd to me that some lenders don’t accept fostering income, at all. Can you imagine the uproar if lenders suddenly decided they wouldn’t accept wages from social workers or firefighters?
“But despite councils desperately trying to recruit caring people to look after the most vulnerable young people in our society, a large section of lenders wants this income to be recorded as a benefit, to be logged alongside Job Seekers Allowance.”
Stamford stressed that as an adviser, he wanted to provide clients a friendly, understanding, and knowledgeable service that foster carers could rely on.
Looking to the future
As his business is still very new – not even a year old, Stamford knows that making people aware that it exists should be his main focus right now.
“I am based in the North Pennines, which is a very large and underserved geographical area, so as well as helping foster carers, I also help people who live locally,” he shared. “Hopefully, I’ll be able to add a case manager before the end of the year and grow from there.”
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