Articles
Contractor lending, self-employed income assessment, loan structuring, and other topics to help you understand your options 

If you've read our self-employed home loans overview or our article on full-doc versus low-doc lending, you'll already know the core problem: good tax planning can make your assessable income look smaller than your real earning capacity. Add-backs are one of the main tools lenders use to close that gap, but they only close part of it. Understanding what actually qualifies as an add-back, and what doesn't, is often the difference between an accurate borrowing capacity estimate

Most self-employed borrowers assume there's one proper way to get a home loan, and a fallback option for people who can't quite make the cut. That's not really how it works. Full-doc and low-doc are two different sets of evidence for the same underlying question a lender is trying to answer: can you service this loan. Which one applies to you depends on what your paperwork can demonstrate right now, not on how "qualified" a borrower you are. If you haven't already, it's worth

A breakdown of what documents PAYG and ABN contractors need for a home loan application, so you're not caught out partway through.

Two contractors can do near-identical work, invoice the same client, and earn the same income… and still get very different answers when they apply for a home loan. The difference usually comes down to how they're paid, not how much. Here's what separates a PAYG contractor from an ABN contractor in a lender's eyes, and why it matters before you apply. Why this distinction matters more than your income Lenders don't just look at how much you earn. They look at how provable and