Chase and his partner Marie are talented young high-fliers working for the same bank. In their early thirties, their careers are progressing rapidly. This Christmas, they’ll be celebrating their fifth anniversary as a couple (they met at an office Christmas Party).
Chase has decided he wants to give Marie a very special present: a gorgeous Stephen Webster diamond-encrusted platinum necklace with matching earrings, but he has a problem: he wants her to open it on Christmas Day, and he won’t receive his very generous but hard-earned bonus until the end of the financial year (31st March 2016). He needs the jewellery before he has the bonus to pay for it.
The couple have a hefty mortgage. They may be high-earners, but like many young high-income people in their position, they’re also high spenders. Chase doesn’t want to be saddled with another long-term debt. The couple live in relative luxury but their disposable income after all outgoings is just enough for them to stay comfortable; any less, especially over an extended period, and that comfort would be squeezed. Given that they work incredibly long hours (Marie in research, Chase in M&A), and rarely take holidays, home comforts and short, exotic breaks take on a special importance to them.
Chase needed £100,000 to pay for the necklace. His expected £120,000 bonus would comfortably cover that. However, it remained tantalisingly out of reach for a Christmas/Anniversary gift. Necessity, it’s often claimed, is the mother of invention. When his career started taking off following his internship with the bank, Chase started investing in gold bullion. He has 6.5kg of 22 carat gold in safe storage. A game plan hatched in his mind: he’d get it valued by an upmarket pawnbroker, place it with them and buy it back when his bonus came in.
However, when he began exploring pawnbroker options, he wasn’t happy with what he saw. He objected, passionately, to the high interest rates they charged, ranging from a wince-inducing APR of 69 per cent to a positively seizure-inciting 162.54 per cent. With hope fast turning into despondency, Chase clicked on a link to the online p2p/alternative finance news outlet Crowdfund Insider featuring radical new peer-to-peer lender, Unbolted. As he read on, his spirits started to rally: Unbolted would offer a secured asset loan if he could provide them with a high value possession that they could use as collateral as security for his borrowing. On visiting the Unbolted website for further details, he loved what he saw: with no intrusive credit searches to contend with, an APR of just 29.54 per cent, no obligation to make monthly payments, provided the loan was settled in 6 months, and no additional fees for settling early, he decided then and there to contact the platform.
The platform had invested in technology – the Niton XRF instrument - not found outside the bullion and assay marketing centres: a thermo-scientific analyser using X-ray fluorescence to identify the purity of the gold. They could lend against the exact carat as a result, storing the bullion in a high security facility with specialist storage facilities for gold.
Chase needed no more persuasion. Upon accurately determining the purity of his bullion, the platform transferred £104,468 into his bank account on the same day and Marie is about to have a stunning gift for her 5th Anniversary Christmas.
