Today I asked a bank for a conventional mortgage and they said no
This tweet (from the reply thread) has the answer[1]:<p>&gt;[Mortgages are easy to get in the US] Only if you&#x27;re employed. Most mortgage lenders here are middlemen who sell your mortgage to Fannie and Freddie, and they have pretty strict guidelines on what they&#x27;ll buy.<p>That is, most lenders don&#x27;t actually use their own judgment about what counts as high risk or what is an appropriate interest rate to charge, but are simply planning to resell to Fannie&#x2F;Freddie, and thus copy-paste their standards.<p>This ... was a shock to me. I had always assumed &quot;banks are happy to lend to anyone who doesn&#x27;t need the money&quot;. Then I retired on crypto gains and tried to get a mortgage (mid-late 2020), where I saw the very same disconnect -- even with <i>liquid</i> assets more than twice enough to buy the place outright, it didn&#x27;t matter. Nor did arbitrarily increasing the down payment. Anything above 50% down didn&#x27;t affect the rate, and even then I&#x27;d pay above 5% interest, when conventionals were getting under 3%.<p>To show you how absurd it is, the FatFIRE[3] people advocate getting around this by setting up a trust that pays your own assets right back to you.[2] Apparently, if the trust would live for 3 years, and you&#x27;ve already taken two months of this &quot;income&quot;, Fannie considers that just as good as a super-reliable W2 income, and will treat it as conventional. Then, you dissolve it after buying and invest the money like you would have before.<p>I ended up just paying cash for the place, which has its own advantages: you can beat out tenuously-financed offers with a lower bid, and you avoid some of the closing costs and mortgage expenses.  It still would have been nice to lock in 30 years of 2.8% interest to apparently-clueless banks.<p>Final note: This guy should be able to get a loan, since, even with the income fluctuations, it&#x27;s consistently high, but yeah, it wouldn&#x27;t be conventional with the absurdly low 30-year-fixed rates.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AzazelAyers&#x2F;status&#x2F;1513784320225206272" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AzazelAyers&#x2F;status&#x2F;1513784320225206272</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fatFIRE&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ojs18l&#x2F;obtaining_a_mortgage_using_a_grantor_trust&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fatFIRE&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ojs18l&#x2F;obtaining_a...</a><p>[3] FIRE = financially independent and retired early<p>(Throwaway because of personal details.)