My husband and I bought a townhome before living at our new duty station. We are an hour away from his work but the commute is much longer with traffic, an hour and 45 minutes most days. We bought with a VA loan and have lived here two months but he leaves so early and gets home so late. We want to move on base and rent just to eliminate the commute. Is there a way to bypass the 12 month occupancy rule and rent out our home sooner? We just didn't realize how much traffic there was. We would make a very marginal profit, like $50, a month maybe by renting but we don't even care. We just want someone else's to pay the mortgage so we can not have a commute and can get to the point where we can sell and break even one make a small profit if we are lucky. Any information is helpful!

Contact the lender and explain the situation to see if they'll allow an acceptance. They may, depending on the situation.

If they refuse, then renting the home would be a violation of your agreement. You'll have to decide if that's worth the risk of getting caught and having them nail you.

You don't say where you live. Did you even ask anyone what the commute was like? I can't imagine driving an hour one way. I can't imagine buying a house without asking a few people about the commute. 

We live outside of Washington DC. The problem was that we didn’t have an exact location of my husbands job, he's active duty Army, until a month after we were in our home so I had to work on an assumption of where it would be.

I incorrectly assumed he would be able to take the VRE or Rideshare by Slugging to work, which is not the case. We knew it would be at least 45 minutes at a minimum which we were fine with but the traffic here makes it double that. If he could ride share it wouldn’t be an issue but the nature of his job prevents that. 

We wanted to buy off the bat because the rent is so high in this area that we’d be throwing away 30 grand if we waited to buy. I can live with the situation if we have to, at least he’s not deployed, but if there’s a way out sooner than I’d like to explore that. 

I’ve contacted our lender, I’m waiting to hear back.