An extremely hot topic in the Mortgage industry (and media) at present is the challenges that prospective borrowers are now facing with regards to the changes recently made to the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act (CCCFA). Rather than get all financey on it, we’ll break it down nice and simple. This legislation is what the government uses to regulate and ensure that lenders are acting responsibly when lending money to consumers. Want to finance that new TV? That falls under CCCFA. Want to finance a new car? CCCFA. Want to buy that house you’ve been saving years for? That’s CCCFA too. Basically, if you’re a consumer and you want to borrow money for something, you will most likely be affected by the new CCCFA regulations and there’s no denying, it’s ALOT harder now to borrow money than it was 2 months ago.
Now the media attention at the moment is heavily focussed around things like how many cups of coffee a borrower pays for and how much they spend on wine while out having a much deserved break over the holiday period. While these things may impact on someones ability to service a mortgage from the lenders perspective, often there are much bigger challenges at play that are not being talked about, and they are quite often an easy fix once you understand the impact they are having on your financial situation. To make matters worse, if you go to your bank and enquire about getting a mortgage, they can’t offer you personalised financial advice to help you into the position to be approved for a lend. So, people come away from their bank with a decline and a feeling of helplessness when with a little understanding and guidance the story could have a much happier ending. This is where we come in, one of the most common things we hear as Mortgage Advisors is “We’ve been to our bank but they said that we can’t do it for X/Y/Z reason”. Now we are more commonly hearing “we don’t think we’ll get an approval because of the article we read online”.
We recently had some clients of ours settle on their first home here in Matamata who we had been dealing with since April 2021. When they first approached us they were thinking that they were a long way off home ownership but in reality they were in a good position, we just needed to work through their outside debt and get their serviceability right. We refinanced their car loan onto a better interest rate with lower repayments, repaid and closed some outside debts to further free up serviceability and then started approaching lenders to get a pre-approval in place for them. We got a pre-approval for them and after months of searching and a handful of houses that they missed out on due to the competitive nature of the market, they were finally able to get an offer accepted and purchase their first family home. If these clients had gone direct to their bank instead of working through the process with us, there is a very high likelihood that they would still be renting right now and wouldn’t have learnt about how little things in your financial situation can have such a huge impact on your ability to move forward in life.
This is why it’s so important to have someone like us on your team. Once we have worked through our process and understand your financial situation fully, we can offer prospective borrowers advice, guidance and their best options moving forward. It might be that you are actually in a great position to get an approval immediately, or it might be that we need to change a few things to get you into that same great position like for our clients above, or it could be that we bring something to your attention that is holding you back from getting an approval that you didn’t realise was having such a dramatic impact on your situation. Whatever the outcome, we take pride in walking people through their home buying journey and we get a real kick out of helping our clients get the approval they need to get them into a property of their own.
So don’t let what you read in the media or what your mates cousins sister tells you about their experience in trying to buy a property get to you, get in touch with us and let us walk you through the process. You might be surprised at where you’re actually positioned right now!

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