Self-employed are frozen out of mortgages

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122818315556971151.html

by jon_dahl • 17 years ago

16 25 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

jon_dahl• 17 years ago

I'm currently having this experience. Trying to buy a house, but because my income has come from a variety of sources over the years - a small consulting company, a startup, and my own independent consulting - it's going to be tough for me to qualify. Specifically, my income source changed from 2008 to 2009, and they won't accept the 2009 income at all, because the entity is new. I've had steady income - and provided steady income for employees and contractors - but that's not enough.

onreact-com6• 17 years ago

Try peer to peer lending instead:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841484

Who trusts banks these days anyways? When they go bankrupt you lose your home.

immad• 17 years ago

Will p2p lending work for mortgages? Do they have p2p loans configured towards mortgages? It would have to be pretty different to the normal unsecured loans

onreact-com6• 17 years ago

Did you follow the link? It starts/ends with a story about a guy who bought a home with a p2p credit.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

I'm confused. The bank that held my mortgage went bankrupt. Strangely enough, I still seem to have my house. Seriously, what are you talking about?

onreact-com6• 17 years ago

Sorry, I don't want to explain the financial crisis to you but in short it was something like this: The financial system broke down, banks either went bankrupt or had to be rescued by tax payer money.

As a result of the financial crisis many people lost their homes. Maybe that was too complex for you to understand the connection and you still trust your bank. That's OK for you, it's your choice. Still many people don't trust banks anymore with good reason.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

Yup. Had this problem in '05. Not even going to talk about what we did to solve it --- extremely skeevey. I doubt I could have bought at all under current conditions.

Buying is overrated anyhow, though.

petercooper• 17 years ago

One way I know that people have used was to set up a corporation, put savings into the corp then hire themselves and pay whatever salary they required for a few months. Three payslips later (a common requirement until recently, at least) they could get a mortgage. To do this "legally" requires you paying the taxes on that "income" but that could be worth it.

In my case I got a mortgage in 2007 (one month before the market peaked, woo!) through a mortgage broker who convinced the mortgage company to be happy with 3 years of self employment tax returns, and it wasn't a self certified mortgage or anything crazy.

mikeryan• 17 years ago

I'm actually in this situation now. I run a small consultancy organized as a single member LLC.

Does anyone know if filing taxes as an S-corp and giving myself a salary gets around this at all?

peoplerock• 17 years ago

IANAL, but I'd wager that proof of taxes withheld would be the key issues (pay check stubs, etc.)

hristov• 17 years ago

Oh let us all cry for those poor people that cheat on their taxes. It is very simple, the bank assumes that your income is what you put as your income on your tax return. If you cheated on your taxes and said you have no income then the bank will assume you have no income.

DougWebb• 17 years ago

Anyone who's self-employed should be professional about it, set up an LLC or corporation of some sort, and pay themselves a salary out of the business' net earnings. You pay taxes on the salary, but the business gets a deduction for it, so that's no excuse not to do it this way. And complaining that you can't claim the income as a deductible business expense and available to spend on a mortgage at the same time is just whining: it's a cost of doing business or it's profit in your pocket; you can't have it both ways.

If this is too complex, and you want the simplicity of being a self-proprietor, then accept the consequences, including not having documented proof of steady income.

mattculbreth• 17 years ago

Probably good enough advice, but the salary and tax part isn't really the key issue. It's fine to be a single member LLC and do the estimated quarterly taxes thing. As long as all of your deductions are reasonable your taxable income should be just about what you actually have. If you have multiple years of this kind of income the bank becomes agreeable to it.

It also helps to have a high income if you're going to do this, but then again that's why you do the LLC thing in the first place.

pmichaud• 17 years ago

This is part of the reason I'm buying in cash right now. It used to be that it was insane to buy in cash because mortgage rates were way lower than average market gain. Now that's not so much the case.

joevandyk• 17 years ago

I've been self-employed for 2.5 years. I have an LLC. I got a mortgage last month.

Self-employed are frozen out of mortgages

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