Friends, as many of you know, I have been trying to buy a house for a while now.

The hunt really started in November, which I very naively just started looking for houses online through Zillow.

I finally found a few I was interested in, gave Zillow my info and then received 18000 phone calls in 3 minutes from realtors.

I quickly was passed on to a mortgage company to see what I could qualify for.

I – stupidly – thought this would be a slam dunk. I am good with money! I have an excellent credit score! I have a large down payment! I have substantial financial assets!

L.O.L.

They seriously only really care about if you have steady income.

I could have a garbage credit score, $3,500 in total to put down, and a good, steady job at Starbucks never making a penny more than minimum wage and I would’ve qualified with no problem.

…maybe a tiny hiccup with the garbage credit score, but we probably still could’ve worked with that.

Guy. Mortgage companies hate freelancers and they like super, uber hate you if you go between 1099s and W-2s on a regular basis – ya know, like pretty much every theater freelancer because theaters and production companies are all set up a number of ways.

Well, that first Zillow phone call was fairly polite. I told the dude I was starting a contract at a university in about a month and he told me just to wait till I had two pay stubs and try again.

When I did, they did not like my tax returns and their varied weirdness one bit. They said no thank you.

I did this with three other mortgage companies – all no thank yous.

Then I opened an account with the Actors Federal Credit Union figuring they were probably my last bet, even though they only have Adjustable Rate Mortgages, and I really just wanted a nice, steady 30 year fixed rate mortgage. But we had reached the point where beggars can’t be choosers. Also, they must understand the plight of the freelance stage manager, right??

AFCU sent me a preapproval notice (yay), but my realtor was like, nope, we need more thorough approval before we go house hunting. So he tried to contact them and I tried to contact them and no answers for either of us.

This does match the majority of reviews I read which said the rates are low but the customer services is abysmal. I mean, I can generally handle abysmal customer service, but if it means I can’t even complete the process to get the loan, what. the. eff.

So, with this new realtor, he sent me to one of his mortgage people who specialize in weird loans – Movement Mortgage.

And they also were like – nope, don’t like your work history, but they were actually helpful and instead of flat noping me, we had a whole conversation about things I could do to improve this situation.

Their main recommendation was to find a co-signer. Which caused a deep internal sigh because I don’t love anyone deciding I’m not responsible enough for something but also because I knew my best co-signing bet was my dad.

Who also owns his own business.

Where do they think I learned the freelance life???

Anyway, my most recent house update is that I am still quasi-house hunting. The Movement folks are rechecking my mortgage application now with my dad as a co-signer, which if it gets approved seems flipping ridiculous to me because he is quasi-retired and made a lot less than me last year.

They have already mentioned they don’t like the large fluctuations in his income as reflected by his tax returns (duh, you totally make a lot less when you decide you’re starting to coast into retirement, also this is what freelancing and owning your own business is figure out how to weigh our cash assets better please).

And I really suspect that when my lease is up in July, I will be moving back in with my dad for a few months. Years. Till I die. Whatever.