Loan navigation · Australia
Not sure which loan you are even looking at?
Australian borrowing splits into seven lanes with different rules, different evidence and different regulators. Answer three questions and this site tells you which one you are in — then hands you the questions that actually decide your outcome.
The seven lanes
Same word, seven different sets of rules
“Getting a loan” means something different in each of these. Picking the wrong lane is the reason people spend weeks answering questions that were never going to decide anything.
First home loan
Your first owner-occupied purchase, where deposit size and government schemes usually decide more than the headline rate.
What decides it ›Refinance
Moving an existing loan to a different lender or a different product, where the switching cost decides whether it was worth it.
What decides it ›Investment property loan
Borrowing against a property you intend to rent out, where tax treatment and serviceability buffers behave differently from a home loan.
What decides it ›Self-employed and low doc
Borrowing when your income comes from an ABN, a company, a trust or contract work, where proving income is the whole job.
What decides it ›Commercial and business lending
Borrowing secured by commercial property, or for the business itself, where the assessment is about the business rather than a household budget.
What decides it ›Car and personal loans
Short-term consumer borrowing where the term and the fees, not the headline rate, usually decide what it costs you.
What decides it ›Bridging finance
Short-term borrowing that covers the gap when you buy before you sell, priced on the assumption the gap closes quickly.
What decides it ›By situation
Where your income comes from changes the rules more than the loan does
Two people can want the same loan and be assessed on completely different evidence. These pages cover what shifts for each profile, whichever lane you end up in.
How to use this
Three things this site is good for
- Working out which conversation to have. The lane page tells you the two or three questions that decide your outcome, so a fifteen-minute call gets you somewhere.
- Assembling paperwork before it delays you. Every lane lists the evidence that gets asked for. Applications stall on missing documents far more often than on the numbers.
- Checking a claim against the source. Schemes, caps and thresholds are set by government, and every link here goes to the agency that sets the rule.
What each lane carries
The same four things, every time
- Who the lane is for. Plain criteria, so you can tell in ten seconds whether you are in it.
- What decides the outcome. The two or three questions that settle it, in the order they bite.
- The evidence to assemble. Applications move at the speed of the missing document.
- The official source. A link to the agency that sets the rule, plus the date this page was reviewed.
Who publishes this: the team behind Arrivau, an Australian finance business. Worth knowing, because who wrote something is part of how you weigh it.
Questions
What people ask before they trust a site like this
What do I actually get out of the three questions?
One of seven lanes, plus the two questions that decide your outcome inside it, the assessment differences that come from how you earn, and the evidence to have ready. It is a reading list tuned to your situation, and it takes about fifteen seconds.
How does the finder work?
It is a fixed decision table, written by hand and published in the page source, evaluated in your browser. The same answers always produce the same result, and you can read the mapping to see exactly why it landed where it did.
Where do the rules on each page come from?
Australian government sources — ASIC's Moneysmart, the ATO, Housing Australia, APRA, the RBA and the state revenue offices. Each lane links straight to the agency that sets the rule, so you can read the current position first-hand rather than trusting a summary.
Who publishes the site?
The team behind Arrivau, an Australian finance business. That is stated on the About page and in the footer, because knowing who wrote something is part of how you weigh it.
How current is any of this?
Structural facts — how lending is organised, what evidence is required, which regulator owns which rule — move slowly, and every page carries the date it was last reviewed. For anything that moves faster, such as rates and promotions, the pages point at who publishes the number and how often it changes.