Case Study—High-Income Employee Switches to Freelance Work

A highly experienced financial professional earning multiple six figures came to us for a mortgage on a home he could easily afford. He wanted to buy a specific home in a specific neighborhood.

A few months earlier, he had become a freelancer in the same line of business that he had been working in for 20+ years, retaining the same clients and actually earning even slightly more. Because of strict rules used by the vast majority of lenders, he could no longer qualify as an employee. He could also not qualify as a self-employed borrower, because 99.9% of self-employed loan programs require the borrower to have been self-employed for at least two years. He intended to put down a very sizeable down payment, but was still rejected by several other lenders and brokers.

We got him a loan at an ultra-specialized institutional lender, the only lender in the US who offered this ultra-niche loan product for business owners at the time. This loan product was actually meant for a different type of business owner scenario, but we creatively adjusted it to solve the problem in this situation, which worked. at a slightly higher rate (but much less than a private loan), and he was able to secure the home he had his eye on. About 18 months later we helped him refinance into a “standard” self-employed tax return loan at a lower rate.