Buying FHA property if I am not sure, I will stay in the city

[Anton Ermolaev]

Greetings,

I am a software engineer from eastern Europe, who is currently on H1B visa. I am living in US for 2 years and tired of renting. Want to start building equity. I am going to buy a townhome in the great community, I would enjoy living in. It's a 2 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom house for $260k. The problem is that, I can go back home or move to another state/city any time, so, my initial plan was rent out the house if I will need to leave Dallas, so that, it would, at least, pay by itself(0 or small positive cashflow is fine). Also, I am having a friend who is seeking for a room in my area. So, I thought, it would be great, if I could rent him out a second bedroom while living in the first one. Currently, I have only 5% downpayment, so, I was thinking about FHA. After talking to my mortgage broker and reading a lot of articles over the Internet, I found out, that nothing of that is possible: I can't rent out neither a room nor the whole house. Selling townhouse if I will need to move to other location is not an option as well because I will lose a lot of money on closing costs and agent fees.

Then I was thinking about converting it into conventional loan. After some research, I found out, that it's possible. So, here are my questions:

1) What are the requirements, costs and time to convert(refinance) from FHA to conventional? Will PMI be gone after conversion?

2) What do people usually do, if they bought a house on FHA and they need to move to different city/state?

3) Can't I really rent out the room to my friend while I will live in the house? Is this really a FHA loan violation? If so, how would they(banks, government) know, that he is living with me? I was renting a room in Chicago when I just moved to US and, I pretty sure, no one knows, that the house owner rent me a room.

Thanks in advance for your answers