We couldn’t sell our first home (bought it when the market was high) and so we refinanced under Obama’s plan that enabled you to do so even if you didn’t have the equity in your house. this enabled us to lower how much rent we needed to charge. we’ll only be making about off our renters a month.

We want to buy a second home because our family is getting larger, but now we are running into all kinds of issues we didn’t know about. first, our current mortgage holder says we need to make our first house our secondary residence (he said we need to refi again) and then we’ll need to wait at least a year and put down 20%.

We didn’t know any of this. We knew we’d have to prove we had renters, and that they were paying us. (we were told to get copies of the deposit, first months rent and deposit slips)

Can anyone tell us what we should do? does this differ from place to place? We don’t have an FHA for our first loan, so we were going to try and get one for our second house and save up the 3.5% down for the house. We just don’t have the time to save up 20%, no matter how cheap the house is!
let me clarify a few things….we re-fi’d our house so that we could rent it out at a comparable rate to houses surrounding us. when we did the re-fi, we were asked if we were going to sell our house, which we weren’t. no one ever prohibited us from renting it out. if we have to lower our rent in order to show we are basically breaking even, then we will.

Bottom line is that we just want to know how, with having rented our first house, that we can buy a second one.

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