Jason Ruedy Denver

Secondly you can choose to start your own business and take home a larger portion of your earnings.

Typically in the Mortgage Broking industry choosing the second option meant going it alone, which was a long hard road. These days however there are companies available that will help you do everything from planning how you're going to run your business, right through to getting you trained, accredited and joined up with everyone necessary and even mentoring you for the mandatory two year period.

I'll try to break this article into advice for both of these areas although I do have a preference for encouraging potential Mortgage Brokers to start their own business rather than buying a franchise.

Become a Mortgage Broker - Step 1: Training

Official Training

You need to do a course to become a Mortgage Broker in Australia, the minimum course you'll need to complete is a Certificate IV in Financial Services (Finance/Mortgage Broking) FNS40804.

There are many authorized providers of the Certificate IV course throughout Australia with both face-to-face and correspondence type courses available. However if you're just starting out then you will definitely need to do the course face-to-face to get the maximum out of it. It does really help to have the trainers there to answer questions and talk about different scenario's and experiences, often the trainers are brokers themselves which helps.

To find this course in your area just do a Google search for "Certificate IV in Financial Services (Finance/Mortgage Broking) + [insert state or territory here]" i.e. "Certificate IV in Financial Services (Finance/Mortgage Broking) + Brisbane".

Non-Official Training

Completing the Certificate IV course above gets you a piece of paper, in reality though it doesn't really teach you how to be a Mortgage Broker. There is a lot more training that needs to be done to teach you things like:

How to identify the best loan for a client Secondly there are companies out there who will train you correctly that do not require you to buy a franchise from them. Personally I prefer the later and if you go down to the resource box at the bottom of this article you can follow a link to one such company.

Become a Mortgage Broker - Step 2: Association Membership and Mentoring

The next thing you need to do is to become a member of the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia (often called the MFAA). Being a member of the MFAA and providing proof of this is often mandatory for you to become associated (called "accredited") with a lender in Australia.

To become a member of the MFAA means that you'll need to become an Accredited Mortgage Consultant or AMC, if you have less than two years experience as a Mortgage Broker in the last five years then you'll need to be nominated for membership by an existing MFAA member who will undertake to mentor you into the industry.

Your mentor will help you apply for MFAA membership as well as practically help you put together loan applications and help you with the client interviews, etc.

The MFAA require the following for you to apply for membership

A copy of your current External Dispute Resolution (EDR) Scheme membership certificate (i.e. Mortgage Loans After Bankruptcy: What Options Are Available?, Jason Ruedy, Jason Ruedy Denver