How to Buy First Multi-Unit to House Hack

[Jade Pickenheim]

Hello everyone! I've only discovered this community fairly recently, but I am so impressed. I love the wealth of information and the collaborative vibe.

I'm a real estate agent in Pittsburgh, PA who wants to, with my partner and our baby girl, move into a multi-unit building within the next year or two as our first foray into RE investing. Our first problem, though, is that we don't know how we'll buy it. The income from his job is pretty variable (he's a server working on getting his RE license) and so is mine. I've also not been working as much lately because I'm our baby's primary care provider.

We are accumulating cash all the time as we're both excellent savers of the money we do bring in. We both have very good to excellent credit scores. But, from the few talks I've had with lender friends, income is the biggest determinant regarding getting a loan, and neither of ours is great, and as I said, it's variable.

So, decent savings + great credit + low and variable income. After searching the forums and reading some similar threads, we're vaguely familiar with hard money loans and some other creative finance techniques. But I wanted to get some more personal feedback. What are our options?

Thank you all!