Bank said no? Soldier on and talk to a broker

Despite owning a growing business and supplementing his income with a pension from the ADF, former soldier Jake Briggs was told by his bank that he could not secure finance to purchase a home. So he found a broker who knew better.

With his service in the army behind him, Jake Briggs was looking forward to pursuing property investment, but had trouble securing a loan due to his pensioner status.

“The bank had told him that he wouldn’t qualify for a loan,” the finance broker Jake found explains. “So he came to see us and we had a look at his circumstances.”

Jake had been discharged from the army at the age of 25 due to a medical condition that left him unfit to serve.

“He was on a lifetime pension and the people at the branch told him, ‘no, no, you’re a pensioner, you won’t qualify for a loan’,” Jake’s broker says. “He was actually running his own business as a personal trainer. So he had lifetime pension plus he had his own business.”

With the expert guidance and help of his broker, Jake managed not only to secure a home loan, but also go onto secure many more for investment properties all around Australia.

“We put the inquiry through a normal broker-lending channel and it was fine. He is and always was an ideal candidate, and they just didn’t realise,” explains the broker.

“With a lot of my clients it comes down to the fact that today, most of the branch staff haven’t been trained in home lending so they don’t always have all the right answers.”

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