Every lender he approached said no.
He'd been earning higher duties pay for more than three years. It was part of his normal income. He wasn't relying on a few good months or a temporary run of extra shifts.
But there was an end date next to the allowance on his payslip.
That became the problem.
The lenders he approached treated the higher duties as income that was going to end, so they wouldn't use it for the application.
He tried a few lenders himself and eventually gave up.
He figured the refinance just wasn't possible.
The problem was the date
The higher duties had been running for more than three years.
He was still doing the role. He was still receiving the money.
The date on the payslip was part of the way the payment was administered. It wasn't a sign that he was actually about to stop receiving it.
But the lenders couldn't get past what they saw on the payslip.
The allowance had an end date.
So, for their assessment, the income was treated as temporary.
Once that income was taken out of the calculation, the refinance didn't work.
Then we looked at the role
We weren't trying to find a special deal or make the income look bigger than it was.
We needed a lender whose policy allowed the higher duties to be assessed by looking at the job he was actually doing, rather than simply seeing the end date and assuming the payment was about to disappear.
That changed the assessment.
The higher duties could be included.
The refinance went through.
His new loan reduced his repayment by more than $450 a month.
That's more than $5,400 a year.
If you're a nurse, CO or blue-collar worker
This sort of thing can be easy to miss if your income doesn't fit neatly into a standard salary.
You might be doing higher duties. You might have an allowance that's been running for years. You might work regular overtime or receive extra payments because of your roster, site or role.
It's simply part of how you're paid.
Then you apply for a home loan and discover that the lender is looking at the payslip differently from the way you look at it.
You see income you've been receiving for years.
They may see an allowance with an expiry date.
And if you've already been knocked back a couple of times, it's pretty easy to assume the answer is just no.
For this client, it wasn't.
He'd already tried to solve it himself. By the time he came to us, he'd nearly given up.
We found a lender that could assess the income based on the role he was actually performing.
The refinance worked.
And he was suddenly more than $450 a month better off.