Financing 2nd House Hack while keeping first house hack as rental

[Jack Casica]

1. TL;DR: My DTI is too high to qualify for another mortage. What are some options?

My goal this year is to get into a second house hack! BUT I would also like to retain the home I am currently living in as a rental. There are definitely some financing hurdles to figure out before making this a reality.

Here are some notable circumstances:

• - My current house hack has a conventional loan and I have about 8% equity in the house
• - I have been in the primary house hack for more than a year.
• - Although house hacking has allowed me to save more than 60% of my income, on paper, my current mortage puts my Debt-to-Income ratio considerably high thus disqualifying me from financing. 
• - If I were to include the rental income that I would continue to collect from this primary property, it would put me under the 43% DTI lending standard BUT (BIG BUT) I have read that lenders do not allow you to include rental income if its not noted in at least two years worth of tax returns.
  

Some options include:

• Taking out a hard/private money loan for a higher downpayment,thus lowering the conventional loan amount and my Debt-to-income ratio
• Adding a co-borrower's income to mortgage application (then refinance at a later time without them)
• Find a lender who is willing to accept my rental income despite it not showing on 2-years worth of tax returns.

Of course, the easy solution it to lower my DTI by selling the primary house hack. This is not ideal and I think that other reasonable solutions exist.