Home Loan for an Expat Contractor

The challenges were many in this case study.

First of all, to settle the property, dual income was required to establish sufficient borrowing capacity. The female applicant (wife) was added to the application.

The next major hurdle related to the treatment of the male applicant as a self-employed expat. Instead of salary payslips, he received income by issuing invoices under his company to his employer. In expat scenarios, there are limited lenders that can consider PAYG salary employed expats but no prime lenders that can consider self-employed expats 

To add this this hurdle, we found out that the multi-national firm had officers not only in UK, but also in Singapore and Hong Kong. Although the male applicant has worked for the same company for 3 years, he issued invoices to different offices. Therefore his evidence of income was across multiple countries and bank accounts.

• At SF Capital, we submit loan applications only when we are confident of approval. This is to save a credit inquiry on the client’s report for the time when the likelihood of approval is highest.
• Using our lender connections and relationships, we were able to present this scenario to credit without submitting a loan application and without marking the client’s credit file
• The male applicant was treated as self-employed purely on the basis that income was received by way of invoices, however we identified other aspects of the male’s employment was identical to if he was PAYG employed: 

• • he only worked for one company
  • he was a permanent employee
  • he had fixed hours of work
  • he consistently received the same income amount

This was all confirmed by his employment contract and bank statements.

• By presenting these aspects as outweighing the fact that he invoiced for his income and that he only strategically did this to increase his net of tax pay, we were able to achieve a policy exception to treat his income as PAYG with a prime lender
• As a result we were able to achieve the maximum LVR for expats that the lender offered at the time which was 70%.