Every word of the film, for reading instead of watching.
People hear a debt to income number and treat it like a cutoff. It isn't one. Here's what it actually is. Start with the fact that it's two numbers, not one.
Thirty one, and forty three. The first is your housing payment against your income. Principal, interest, taxes, insurance, all of it. The second is every monthly debt you carry against that same income.
Housing, plus the car, plus the cards, plus the student loans. Thirty one and forty three is the printed baseline. But that's not the test most people actually take. Nearly every FHA file gets scored first through something called TOTAL.
It's FHA's scorecard, and it isn't looking at your ratio by itself. It's weighing the whole picture at once. Your credit. Your income.
Your assets and reserves. The size of the payment you're taking on. And it comes back one of two ways. Accept means the scorecard is satisfied, and files clear well above thirty one and forty three this way, regularly, when the rest of the file is strong.
Refer means a human underwrites it. That is not a denial. It's a closer look. And here's a rule worth knowing.
A lender may not approve or deny an FHA loan based only on what that scorecard says. A person is always accountable for the decision. The machine never gets the last word. Now, if your file does go to a human, this is the ladder they're working from.
Thirty one and forty three needs nothing extra. Thirty seven and forty seven needs one compensating factor. Forty and forty, if you carry no discretionary debt. And forty and fifty, with two compensating factors.
The factors are named, and they're things you can go get. Verified, documented cash reserves. A minimal increase in your housing payment from what you pay now. Residual income.
Or significant income you actually earn that isn't already counted in the qualifying figure. One honest boundary. If your score is below five eighty, or you have no score at all, you're held to thirty one and forty three, and compensating factors don't apply. That one is firm.
So a ratio isn't a wall. It's a threshold with named ways past it. If yours is high, the question was never whether you're finished. It's which of those four you can document.