Business owners · Complex income · Companies & trusts
Self-employed income shouldn’t count against your home loan.
You built a business that pays its people, pays its tax and pays your mortgage, and a standard assessment still says your income “doesn’t fit”. Your success shouldn’t count against you. David is a Chartered Accountant and former group CFO. Bring him the whole picture. Based in Port Stephens NSW, with Clarity Calls held Australia-wide by phone and video.
Sound familiar?
The bank can’t read your financials. Somehow that became your problem.
If you’re on a salary, a lender needs two payslips and five minutes. If you run a business, your real position is spread across a company return, maybe a trust, a depreciation schedule, a director’s wage you deliberately keep modest, and profit you sensibly left in the business. All perfectly normal. All invisible to the bank’s standard calculator, which reads a strong operator as a weak borrower: legitimate deductions become “money you don’t have”, retained profit for growth goes unseen, a one-off cost year gets treated as the norm.
And here’s the quieter frustration: many brokerages are built for volume and the easy loans. Handed a two-entity file, some will put it in the too-hard basket, or lodge it exactly as it sits, unexplained, and let the lender’s first “no” stand. Often the file wasn’t unfundable. It was unread. A better reading never guarantees a different answer. But it’s worth knowing which one you got.
Add-backs
Depreciation is a paper expense: no cash left the business. One-off costs (a legal dispute, a fit-out, a bad-debt write-off) aren’t a normal year. Some lenders accept these added back when they’re identified, evidenced and explained properly.
Director’s income, normalised
Many owners pay themselves a modest wage and leave the rest in the company. Assessed on the wage alone, you look underpaid in your own business. The fuller picture can tell lenders a different story, where policy allows for it.
Retained earnings & distributions
Profit sitting in a company or flowing through a trust doesn’t stop being real income because of where it lands. Which entity’s numbers matter, and how they’re presented, changes how the file reads.
None of this is a loophole, and none of it is a promise. Lender policies differ and criteria are strict. Which is exactly the point: the answer you get depends heavily on who assesses you, and how well your story is told. For example, the same financial position can support meaningfully different borrowing amounts at different lenders. Same person, same numbers, different reading.
See a rough, indicative figure with the borrowing power calculator
Talk it through with David: book a Clarity Call
General information only. Your situation gets looked at properly on the call.
The difference
A file read by a CFO, not fed into a form.
David is a Chartered Accountant. He spent around 25 years in family offices and as group CFO of a $50M+ business, building P&Ls, managing multi-entity structures, and sitting on the other side of the table from banks. He’s run his own businesses. And for most of that time he was also broking: over 25 years arranging finance for clients alongside running businesses himself. That combination is rare, and it changes what happens to your file.
Where a standard process types your numbers into a calculator, David starts where a CFO would: what does this business actually earn, and what’s the cleanest way to show a lender that? He rebuilds the financial story (add-backs evidenced, director’s income put in context, the right entity’s numbers doing the talking), then matches it to lenders whose policy suits your income, rather than defaulting to a familiar list.
And because he’s bound by a legal best-interests duty, what you get isn’t a pitch. It’s the options he’s analysed, the one he’d recommend, and the reasons why, explained plainly enough that you could repeat it to your partner over dinner. That’s the bar.
Structures
Companies, trusts, partnerships: fluent, not fazed.
Complex lending usually falls over on one question: who should borrow, and whose financials tell the story? A company with a corporate trustee. A family trust distributing to two directors. A partnership alongside PAYG income. Each structure changes what a lender needs to see, and how guarantees fit together.
David has spent his career inside exactly these structures: as the CFO responsible for them, not just the broker lodging against them. He’s worked across companies, trusts, partnerships and SMSF arrangements, including multi-million-dollar commercial facilities depending on multiple entities read as one picture.
Two boundaries worth stating up front: David is a Chartered Accountant but not a registered tax agent, so tax advice stays with your accountant. He works alongside them, not around them. And these conversations are about how lenders assess structures, not advice on what structure you should have.
Is this you?
Built for the files that make other brokers go quiet.
A strong fit if any of these sound like your situation, and just as honest when it isn’t the right time yet.
Worth a Clarity Call
- Self-employed 2+ years: trading well, financials done, but the bank reads your income as smaller than it is.
- Trading through a company or trust: profit retained, a modest director’s wage, distributions a standard calculator can’t follow.
- A PAYG-plus-business household: one salary, one business income, never presented together properly.
- Multiple entities or directorships: more than one company, a trust or two, told it’s “too complicated”.
- Previously on a low-doc loan: you wonder whether it still fits; your file may deserve a fresh reading.
- Time-poor professionals and tradies: one competent person owning the whole thing beats juggling a bank, an accountant and a broker yourself.
Not yet: here’s what to build first
- Income that’s genuinely spasmodic: a strong year, then a bad one, nothing consistent yet on paper.
- Financials that are years behind lodging.
- No consistent trading history or clean account conduct to point to yet.
Not every situation has a lending pathway today, and David won’t pretend otherwise. Instead of a polite brush-off, you get a plain answer and a build list: what to put in order first. Some of the clients LoanTorq most wants to serve are the ones who were told “not yet”, went and built it, and came back.
Tick two or more of these? That’s usually worth twenty minutes.
Questions
Things people ask David
Aren’t all brokers using the same lenders anyway?
Largely, yes. LoanTorq doesn’t claim secret access. The difference isn’t which lenders; it’s the thinking. Knowing how each lender actually assesses self-employed income, and how to package a file so the strengths are visible, is where the same file can read very differently to a lender. Same panel, different reading.
I’ve been knocked back before. Why would this go differently?
A “no” is a specific lender’s answer to a specific presentation of your file at a specific time. A file presented with the add-backs evidenced and the structure explained is a different application from the same numbers lodged raw. That doesn’t guarantee a different answer, but it’s usually worth knowing rather than assuming.
What does this cost me?
Nothing for the call, and no fee for the broking. If a loan eventually settles through LoanTorq, the lender pays a commission. David will walk you through exactly how that works before anything proceeds.
The information on this page is general in nature and doesn’t take into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs. It isn’t a recommendation about any particular credit product or structure, and it isn’t tax advice. Lending criteria, terms and conditions apply and vary between lenders; eligibility is assessed on individual circumstances.
The Clarity Call
Twenty minutes with someone who can actually read your file.
You’ve spent years building something the standard assessment can’t see. The next step isn’t an application or a form asking for two payslips you don’t have. It’s a conversation with David, someone who spent around 25 years on the other side of the table, who’ll give you a straight answer on the pathway, what to build first, or the honest “not yet”. Every situation is different. That’s the whole point of starting with a conversation.
Book my Clarity CallSee how we could helpNo cost · No obligation · No credit enquiry · A straight answer either way