Construction financing with a low fixed rate

I wanted to follow up briefly here and tell the story to the end, as I often read old threads during the planning phase that matched my situation. So if someone is expecting a child and currently planning financing, they might prepare for something similar.

The financing application we submitted was rejected. As some here had already written, words like parental leave, parental allowance, and part-time work are a red flag for banks.

To ultimately get the financing anyway, we had to provide the following documents:
- My permanent employment contract
- A written confirmation from my employer to rehire me part-time after one year
- A simulation of my part-time salary with 30 hours/week
- An approved parental allowance notice

The latter was the sticking point, because the child was not yet born, so we couldn’t have applied for parental allowance yet. But the bank didn’t care - the income had to be proven without gaps. We offered to provide additional equity as security for the yet-to-be-approved parental allowance months or to submit a guarantee for the amount, but that was also not accepted.

In the end, we actually had to wait two long months until the notice arrived and accept the interest surcharge that had accumulated by then. We then decided to take only a 15-year fixed interest period, which at that time was also at 1.7% - so it’s not a disaster now, but indeed 5 years of security that we lost.

Congratulations on the child. I hope everything went well.

We also had the same situation with parental leave. I was in my last month when we inquired at the bank. It was initially flatly rejected, even though we could prove that the money was still coming in. However, our advisor then submitted requests for the following month, when I was back to working full time. And suddenly, we were gladly accepted.

Congratulations.

YES we know that too