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

You’ve probably seen the claim: switch your home loan from monthly to fortnightly repayments and you will cut years off your loan and save yourself a small fortune in interest, seemingly for free. The numbers used to make that point are usually accurate. What is missing is the explanation of why they work, and it's not simply a change in how often you pay. What "switching to fortnightly" actually means There are two different things a lender can do when you ask to move from m

Sole Trader, Company or Trust: Does Structure Affect Borrowing? Two business owners can report the exact same net profit and still walk into very different borrowing outcomes. The difference often isn't the business, it's the structure sitting around it. A sole trader's profit is unambiguously theirs. A company's profit belongs to the company, until ownership is taken into account. A trust's income depends on who it's distributed to, and how. Why your business structure

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