Investing as a Small Business Owner

[Colin Wood]

I make a living with my own small business teaching piano lessons at my student's homes and performing occasionally.  Business is growing quite rapidly at the moment, and I love the work I do. I've only been in business about 9 months so far, and have only been able to leave my normal job, working in sales at a lumber yard, within the last 3 months. I've been able to support myself comfortably ever since I left college 4 years ago, although I did go back to school recently to complete my piano performance degree. I will be finished with that degree December 2016. I'm in school mostly on scholarship, so I will have little debt by the time I graduate. Personally (not legally of course), I consider school more of a business expense, since having a degree will allow me to charge about 50% more for lessons.

Ideally, I would like to purchase a duplex, triplex, or something similar in the Seattle area where I can live in one unit and rent out the other(s). My purposes in investing in real estate are primarily to stop diverting a the majority percentage of my income into rent, provide myself with a location where I can practice regularly, and build wealth with the property long term. I don't expect to be able to do all this immediately, but I would like to position myself so within the next 2 years I can execute this plan. Sooner would certainly be better than later given the high cost of rent around here. I'm thinking it would be smart to use an FHA loan and not wait to save up a large down payment, just because rent makes up such a large percentage of my expenses, even with roommates, and having access to a piano will allow me to perform more often and increase my income further.

The biggest question I'm having troubles figuring out is this:

How easy is it for someone that's self-employed to get an FHA loan? Do I have to wait a couple years so I can demonstrate more clearly that I do indeed have a sustainable business model, or does having continuous income whether it's from my own income or from a regular W-2 job count?

[Ryan Gillette]

I'm a licensed FHA underwriter if you need anything in the future. Self-employed with FHA is a 2 year requirement. We can sometimes accept a 12-24 month history if the previous job was in the same field (say you were a public school piano teacher), but since you worked in a lumber yard, we would require 24 months minimum. So if you started 02/01/2014, you would need to provide to the underwriter (a) your 2014 tax return (b) your 2015 tax return or signed profit-and-loss (c) your 2016 YTD 01/2016-02/2016 signed profit and loss. We would add all of this income and average over 24 months. There's a lot of self-reporting in this case.

What this means is that you can start shopping in November '15 or December '15, go into contract, and close at your 2 year mark ~02/01/2016. Also note FHA allows you to use 85% of the other units. For example, if you buy a 3 family and the other two units rent for $1000/unit, you could use $1700 as qualifying income (in addition to your two year self-employment average).