Bank Statement Loans for Self-Employed Buyers

Being your own boss is great for building a business and rough on a mortgage application. A conventional lender does not look at what you actually made this year. It looks at your tax returns, and every deduction you took to lower your tax bill also lowers the income the lender sees. Write off enough and you can look like you barely qualify for a mortgage, even while the money in your account says otherwise.

A bank statement loan is built for exactly this problem.

What a bank statement loan actually does

Instead of pulling your income from tax returns, a bank statement loan qualifies you using the deposits across your recent bank statements. The lender adds up what actually came into your account and works from that number, not the bottom line on a Schedule C.

This is a real path to a mortgage for business owners and 1099 earners whose write-offs shrink the income shown on their tax returns. If your bank account tells a healthier story than your return does, this is the program built to use that story.

It is a non-QM product, so shop it around

Bank statement loans fall under what the industry calls non-QM, short for non-qualified mortgage, a category that sits outside the standard conventional and government-loan rules the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau spells out for qualified mortgages. Because of that, the terms are set by each individual lender, not a single uniform rulebook. Down payment, rate, and required reserves all vary from one non-QM lender to the next.

That variation is exactly why comparing lenders matters more here than it does on a plain-vanilla conventional loan. North Florida Mortgage brokers multiple wholesale lenders, so a bank statement file can be run across different desks and compared side by side, instead of taking whatever terms a single bank offers.

Who this actually helps

• Business owners whose accountant does a good job minimizing taxable income, which is great in April and a headache in a mortgage application.
• 1099 contractors and freelancers who do not have a W-2 employer's income to point to.
• Anyone self-employed who has been turned down or quoted a low number based on tax-return income that does not reflect what they actually bring in.

If any of that sounds like your file, it is worth a conversation before you assume tax-return income is the only number a lender will look at.

Run your file before you rule yourself out

Every non-QM lender sets its own rules, so the only way to know what you qualify for is to run your actual bank statements against a few different programs. What one lender quotes you is not the ceiling.

Call North Florida Mortgage at 904-389-4635. We will run your bank statements across our wholesale lenders and show you what your real numbers, not your tax return, can qualify for.