US expat buy-to-let remortgage with £90K debt consolidation

The Scenario

Our clients have been living in San Francisco for four years, where she’s the development director for an American media multinational and he’s running his UK consultancy remotely.

They wanted to remortgage their home back in the UK, which they’ve rented out. Their current mortgage was a modest £296K on a house valued at £1.29M, and they were looking to capital raise £92K to pay off their international relocation expenses and the cost of school fees for their three children.

The Solution

This finance was going to be a challenge because most lenders put a ceiling of £30-£40K on the amount of debt consolidation they’re happy for a remortgage to pay off.

We took our clients’ application to a lender we do a lot of work with, whose established ceiling for debt consolidation limit is in this range.

The amount we were looking for was well beyond their set criteria, but this is the advantage of bespoke lending. The business development manager we work with was able to look at:

• our clients’ very substantial earnings
• the low LTV
• the strong evidence for how the capital had been spent

and say “this is business we should be happy to do.”

She also bent the rules when it came to the application process. The bank has an online application template that every application must be loaded into. But our clients’ multinational employer doesn’t issue individualised employment letters: their records are also online. The bank was prepared to make a first-ever exception to their process.

To speed up the application, our advisor arranged to meet up with the couple when they came over on a family visit, to verify their identification documents in person.

The result: a two-year fixed rate deal at a very acceptable expat rate.