Co-Signing for My First Investment Property

[Ethan Ruttan]

I'm 22 and am buying my first investment property and plan on house hacking it. I work as an independent contractor as a real estate agent and welder. This will be my first house and I'm buying it with an FHA loan. I am locked in for a 5.75% interest rate (after a 1% rate buydown) and my bank at first said I only had to put 10% down. Now the bank is saying that I will have to go through manual underwriting and put about 20% down, because of how I did my write-offs for my 1099s. I had an increase in welding income but more than a 20% decrease in real estate income. I am only $1000 short in real estate income (that's the income the are going off of for the loan). At that higher down payment I'm only able to afford it if I liquidate most of my stock portfolio, and then I won't have any cash left over for the repairs that I need to do. I do have the option of co-signing which would also allow me to only put down only 5%. I am trying to avoid co-signing because so I'm not relying on my parents and I'm not sure when I will be able to refinance to get their name off of it. Is there a way that I can adjust my income to get that extra $1000, or do I need to suck up my pride and co-sign?