Louise's Story

Louise is a single mum who applied for a home loan to purchase her First Home through another avenue and found a House and Land Package in her ideal location with her finance settling in September 2021.

Unfortunately, being in the middle of the Covid Pandemic the original builder went out of business before they had even started her construction. Louise set out to find another builder willing and capable of completing her dream of home ownership for her young family.

This left Louise with vacant block of land she was paying a mortgage for, and still paying rent. She found another builder, worked with them to select and design a home that suited her family’s needs. Once the contract was signed in October 2022, she went back to her original funder only to be told that she was now not able to obtain the additional funds required to construct her family home. Because of the time that had passed and cost increases in building products her construction costs were now higher than the amount the funder was willing to lend.

Louise was starting to think the opportunity for her children to have their own home was slipping away. Then she had a chance meeting with Jason Woon late 2022, and upon hearing her story offered his services to see if he could help her achieve her dream. They met up for her initial consult early 2023.

The following challenges for her were quickly identified. Louise had a slightly fluctuating income due to her chosen profession, with increasing interest rate eroding her borrowing capacity, and a lot of her income being shift penalties/allowances and overtime etc.

Louise had a good credit record and an excellent savings history, but a lot of lenders would baulk at her fluctuating income on top of the 3% servicing buffer which is above the applied interest rate. Her standard borrowing capacity was calculated to be approximately $25,000 below what she needed to complete her home.

Once Jason had completed a full financial analysis for Louise, he spent a substantial amount of time scouring through a lot of different lenders “Acceptable Income Policies” to find a lender that would consider all of her income. This perseverance paid off as he found a lender that wouldn’t shade her allowances and penalties. After informing Louise of this product, it was decided to lodge an application and her builder was informed that there was an active submission for finance.

Louise hit another hurdle in her quest for her home as the builder advised just days after being notified of the application that they would be cancelling her contract if formal approval wasn’t obtained in 5 business days. Due to lenders service levels this was not achieved, and the application was paused.

Once Jason had a new contract from the builder, he recalculated Louise’s servicing with the (again) higher construction costs. It was quickly identified that her application could still proceed, just at a slightly lower Loan to Value Ratio (LVR) and utilising some more of her savings to complete the deal.

The application was resubmitted with Conditional Approval being attained within a week and Formal Approval one week after that.

The loan settled in August 2023 and Louise’s new family home is now under construction after she was told various times it would not happen.