Personal Loans

A personal loan is money borrowed over a set term for almost any personal purpose. These are the five reasons we see most:

• Debt consolidation. Rolling credit cards, buy now pay later balances and old loans into a single repayment with a clear end date.
• Renovations. Kitchens, bathrooms, fencing, a deck before summer. Jobs too small to refinance the mortgage over but too big for savings.
• Travel. Overseas trips, family reunions, the honeymoon that kept getting postponed.
• Medical and dental. Surgery, dental work, orthodontics, IVF. Costs that will not wait for a better month.
• Weddings. Spreading the cost of the day over a term instead of loading it all onto credit cards.

Loans come in two broad types. A secured loan is backed by an asset, usually a vehicle, which lowers the lender's risk and can strengthen your application. An unsecured loan has no asset behind it, so the lender leans harder on your credit history and income. If the money is for a car specifically, a proper car loan is usually the better tool. Our car finance page covers that in detail.

Here is the problem with shopping for a personal loan on your own. Every full application triggers a hard credit check. Apply with one lender, get declined, try another, and you have two enquiries on your file inside a fortnight. Lenders read a cluster of recent enquiries as a warning sign, so each knock-back makes the next approval harder to get.

A broker flips that around. You talk to us once. We assess your situation against a panel of 30+ lenders, banks and specialist non-bank lenders both, then approach the one most likely to approve you on terms that suit. The first conversation is soft: it takes about two minutes and involves no credit check, so your score stays exactly where it is. Nothing touches your file until you have seen your options and told us to proceed.

That matters most when your file already has a dent or two in it. We would rather tell you honestly that the timing is wrong than lodge an application that gets declined and leaves another mark. A straight no today beats a paper trail of rejections.

Three things drive what a lender will put on the table:

• Credit history. Defaults, late payments and past enquiries all count. A clean file opens the most doors, but a blemish is not the end of the conversation. Specialist lenders on our panel will look at what caused it and what has changed since.
• Income stability. Steady PAYG income is the simplest case. Self-employed or trading under an ABN? You still have options, including low doc finance that works from bank statements rather than full financials.
• Existing commitments. Every credit card limit, loan repayment and buy now pay later account counts against you, including cards you never use. Closing unused limits before you apply can genuinely improve the outcome.

One honest note on consolidation, since it is the request we hear most. Combining debts into one loan only works if the spending that created them has stopped. Cut up the cards and consolidation gives you one repayment and a finish line. Keep swiping and you end up with the new loan plus fresh card debt, which is worse than where you began. We will tell you plainly whether it stacks up for you. And if the loan touches your business or raises tax questions, run the structure past your accountant first; we arrange finance, we do not give tax advice.