Show Me The Money...No Really...Where Is The Money?

​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!

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