Advice on Buying a First Home

[Jameson Tanner]

Hi BP fam, I am in dire need of some advice on how to get myself out of a sad situation. I’ll try to make it as short as possible:

Since last past year I have been sacrificing and saving as much as I possibly can to buy a condo with an FHA loan. I'm 26 and need to get started as soon as I can. I finally have enough money to put on a down payment and I found a condo by my house where the numbers actually work on my analysis to house hack! I live in an expensive market and the cheapest 3b/2ba condo is around $215,000. This condo is $256,900 and is going to be completed in June of 2021 and they already have people submitting offers because of the demand in my area.

Here comes the sad part: I submitted paperwork and tax returns to two different lenders to pre-qualify for that property. I was worried about my income level because I have been running my own business for 2+ years and I do a couple of side hustles to get around $3000/month in income. The lenders both came back and said that in order to buy any type of property, I would need to basically double or triple my income to qualify. I already work days and nights and I am running out of ideas on how to do this. I don’t need a brand new condo, but since I live in such an expensive market, $256K is on the lower end of things.

The other option I have is to get a co-signer, but both my parents are in so much debt and bad credit scores that the lenders would never approve them and I don’t have anyone else that I could ask to put a property on their debt-to-income ratio/credit report.

I know I can get out of this predicament, I just don’t know how yet! I just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas on what to do. I appreciate you reading through this!