​I really enjoy being surprised by new scenarios, and as many of my good referrers know I actually like a challenge.

So, when a local law firm sent me a family to help obtain some finance for, and they said “We don’t really have any income”, I became curious.

Logically, people don’t survive without income, we all have expenses, so I knew the clients must have income streams. They had been knocked back by a few banks because ‘they had no income’, so they'd been told. In honesty they just hadn’t dealt with someone willing to listen to their story. A good mortgage broker will interpret the clients story, and the careful nuances of policy required, to find a path to approval. We just had to extract the information, and by that I mean, we must listen.

Meeting new clients for the team at Wilson Financial is an art form for us. We are not about the transaction, or here to talk about ourselves, we are here to get to know our clients inside out. That saying, ‘knowledge is power’ is so fitting for our industry. You can uncover real insight if you just listen and learn from your clients.

“So tell me about what you all do?” was my first question.

Firstly, one of the applicants within the family group explained that she received an aged pension. Bingo! Acceptable to some lenders, and completely tax free! Of course some lenders reject this income source, however others, even mainstream ones, find it to be a perfectly reliable income. “I also work two days a week but it’s not really much” said the same lady who received the aged pension. Despite the minimal hours, she had held the job long term, so this was quite a stable and secure income in the banks eyes.

You may be wondering, how does an aged pensioner obtain a loan? Well in this case the other applicants were younger, so we could build a joint case to lend, as long as we had an ‘exit strategy’ for how the loan was going to be paid off long term.

So we already had two incomes that both the applicant, and other lenders had already thought were not important enough to consider. Very good ones in my eyes.

Next, one of the younger applicants explained that they owned two overseas properties receiving income. Whilst they were problematic in nature at present, there were specific documents they could retrieve for us to be able to include a large portion of these incomes. So we now had four income sources.

The younger applicants had children, so received some Centrelink part A&B payments. We could include 100% of this income as the children were under the age threshold the banks required them to be to use this, and further it is untaxed income so ever dollar counted. We now had five income sources.

Suffice to say the loan ended up being a breeze to approve, we simply had to provide the correct documents to satisfy the bank. We also presented an overall strategy for how the three applicants would cover the debt long term.

So next time your client is struggling with a lender, send them somewhere for some outside of the box thinking!

​A good client of mine referred a colleague to me, lets call her "Angie". This is always the best compliment you can give a broker by the way!

Angie had rung her existing home loan lender for a top up to renovate her kitchen. They had said they would consider it but the top up would need to be a separate home loan, she didn't want this, but they said there is no choice, you have to have a separate loan facility. Already disgruntled with the rate, Angie rang another more competitive local building society. The building society said they could consider her, they ordered a bank valuation, but it came in too low. This was odd because their home was on a plot of land four times the size of everybody else’s property on the street. They had been told, “There are not enough sales of the same size blocks to justify a higher price on your valuation”.

Angie had obviously been talking to her colleague at work about all the problems and frustrations. Her colleague Jack, had also visited two lenders before he had rung Wilson Financial so knew it was worth a shot. He knew we could turn bad news around to good. So Angie rang us for a chat and spoke to Liz who happened to answer the phone that day.

When she rang, she explained her disappointment that she could not do a top up loan to her existing, and required a 'separate facility'. She did not see the point of having two separate home loans. Liz explained that she could have one simple home loan with any of our lenders, and it wouldn’t be an issue. We have no idea why a lender would require this but it was enough to turn her off dealing with them. Secondly, she explained the valuation. Liz asked a few questions and ordered a valuation online with one of our preferred lenders. We say preferred because their prices are low, their valuations can be completed online, and their policies have a wide scope. The products are good to boot. The valuation came in immediately, and was high enough to borrow what Angie needed so Liz let her know we could proceed to application.

Of course, Angie wanted to know about the rates we could offer. Whilst we had been talking Liz had emailed Abby to start negotiated pricing online and an automated response offering one of the lowest rates we can get on the market had been received minutes later. Liz let her know. She almost did not believe us. We then reviewed her income and outgoings, dependents and overall affordability situation. Liz was able to confirm we could lend her the money if we simply reduced one of the credit cards down a little. Angie was happy to do this. She asked what next so we sent her an application and checklist. After thanking me for the help, we hung up. We had spent less than 20 minutes on the phone and covered all of the territory required to qualify Angie for a home loan. No bank valuer would be required to go out and file a report which can take a week,. We also had all the fees and rates ready to send her to sign, and we knew that if the payslips matched the data she gave us we would be ok.

Suffice to say, the loan went through smoothly and Angie is now with her new lender and the renovations are now complete. We do not just shop around for clients on price, we shop on solutions. Lending can actually be easy.