We are trying to invest in real estate but keep hitting a wall when it comes to lenders. Please help! Here’s our story…
My husband is self employed, we have 2 businesses & I work for a company. As far as our businesses, we try to make the businesses look like a loss or show little income, for tax purposes.
We have $200k in equity in our home, our restaurant is paid off, we have money in the stock market, great credit scores and a large sum of money in savings. We pay all credit cards off every month and the only loan we have is our mortgage on our home.
The problem is that every time we apply for a loan to invest in property, we’re told that self-employment is not ideal and that our debt to credit ratio prevents us from getting a loan. Specifically, we were recently told “if a lender could consider the financial assets of the borrowers to offset the high debt ratios, that would make sense, however that’s not part of the ATR requirements”. 
I feel defeated. I have applied with smaller local banks, mortgage lenders, boffer banks, and I seem to get the same response. Most of them don’t even look at our application or any supporting documents, they see self employed and say no. 
Does anyone have any advice or know any way around the ATR requirements of our debt to credit ratio exceeding 43%? Apparently it doesn’t matter how much we have in equity or in the bank because they can only consider my income because my husband’s self employed, and we, like most people, write off as much as possible, which results in our business showing a loss or low profit. 
I would appreciate any help or advice!