Settled Scenarios
TRUST STRUCTURE

Family trust acquiring a wholesaling business

A family trust with multiple trading businesses acquiring a wholesaling business from retiring vendors, with commitments spread across several entities.

$605k

LOAN AMOUNT

Business

PURCHASE

$100K

DIVIDENDS ADDED BACK

THE STORY

The file, in three parts

What the broker brought, how the credit analyst read it, and what settled

01 · The challenge

A family trust that already owned several trading businesses sought funding to acquire a wholesaling business from vendors who were retiring. The obstacle was not performance, it was legibility. The applicants’ group structure ran across multiple entities carrying both personal and business debt, with commitments interrelated between them. Each business was meeting its own obligations, but assembling a single coherent servicing picture across the whole group was difficult, and a consolidated view risked counting obligations against an acquisition that had nothing to do with them.

02 · How VMG assessed it

Human underwriting narrowed the question rather than widening it. Credit assessed the new borrowing on the vendor’s financial statements alone, isolating the wholesaling business being purchased from the applicants’ existing operations. Dividends of $100,000 that the vendors had previously treated as part of their wages were added back, which gave a truer picture of what the business actually earned. Because the existing personal and business debts were demonstrably being serviced by the entities responsible for them, those commitments were not brought into the assessment of the new $605,000 facility.

03 · The outcome

VMG settled the $605,000 acquisition and the trust completed the purchase. Assessing the target business on its own numbers, rather than attempting to model an entire group in one calculation, was what made the file workable.

THE TURNAROUND

Before and after

The same file, before the refinance and at settlement.

BEFORE VMG

Multiple entities within the group, carrying both personal and business debt.
Commitments interrelated across entities, making the overall position hard to read.
Vendor earnings understated by dividends recorded as wages.
Acquisition at risk of being assessed against unrelated group obligations.

AFTER SETTLEMENT

New borrowing assessed on the vendor’s financial statements alone.
$100,000 in dividends added back to reflect true business earnings.
Existing debts left with the entities servicing them.
Purchase completed from the retiring vendors.

💡THE VMG COMMON-SENSE ADVANTAGE

A complicated group does not always need a complicated assessment. Sometimes the right move is to work out which numbers actually belong to the loan being written.

HOW IT WAS ASSESSED

Human underwriting

Every file is read by a credit analyst, not scored by a system. There is no credit scoring, and no DTI or DSR ratio applied. The product and the terms depend on the individual file, so talk to your BDM about where a similar scenario fits.

Have a similar file?

Test the scenario with VMG credit before you lodge. VMG lends only through accredited mortgage brokers.

Related

More settled scenarios

FUTURE INCOME STREAM
Owner occupied purchase supported by PAYG salary and the remaining tranches of a business sale being paid out over five years.

$1.8m

LOAN AMOUNT

Owner Occ

SECURITY

5 years

SALE TRANCHES
LOW CREDIT SCORE
Seven loans consolidated for a borrower with a low credit score, all repayments current, after the file had been declined elsewhere.

$508k

LOAN AMOUNT

7 Loans

CONSOLIDATED

$525

MONTHLY REDUCTION
DEBT CONSOLIDATION
A tradesperson left solely responsible for eight loans after a separation, with repayments slipping as rates rose.

$552k

LOAN AMOUNT

8 loans

CONSOLIDATED

$1,290

MONTHLY REDUCTION

QUESTIONS

Frequently asked questions

Trust borrowing is assessed case by case. Credit will want the trust deed, the structure of the trust and its trustee, details of beneficiaries, and financials for the trading entities involved. Guarantee arrangements are a central part of the assessment, so establish early who is guaranteeing what.
Addbacks are considered where the financials support them and the item is genuinely not an ongoing cost of the business. Vendor wages and dividends often need adjusting to reflect what the business will actually earn under new ownership rather than what suited the outgoing owners' tax position. An accountant's letter explaining each addback will strengthen the file.
Not necessarily. Where a debt is serviced by an entity in its own right and the applicant is not personally liable for it, it may be excluded from the servicing calculation for the new facility. Credit will want evidence that each entity is meeting its own commitments. Clear separation between entities makes this much easier to establish.

All applications are subject to Victorian Mortgage Group’s standard credit assessment and lending criteria. Terms, conditions, costs and charges apply. This article is general information only and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs.

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