Asset-Based Mortgages

It treats the deposit as cash sitting in an account, and it asks two questions: is this money fully yours, and can you prove where it came from?

Unvested balances are not the borrower’s money yet under tax law, so an underwriter has no basis to count them.

Deferred compensation is money you’ve earned but haven’t been paid yet. That’s the whole tension.

Business accounts, unvested stock, and real estate equity typically don’t count.

Vested retirement accounts count too, once the borrower shows access to them.

It is not fixed by federal rule — the OCC leaves the number to each institution’s own written policy.

That means a bigger reserve requirement directly shrinks the income figure the file can use.

An asset depletion mortgage lets a borrower qualify using investment and retirement account balances instead of tax returns or pay stubs.

Asset depletion skips income entirely and converts a balance sheet into a monthly qualifying number.

The file also needs the same credit, reserve, and property documents any purchase requires.

Asset depletion solves that by turning distributed, personal liquid assets into a qualifying monthly income figure — no W-2 stack, no K-1 guesswork.

The property still has to pass as a true second home, not a disguised rental.

The list changes depending on whether assets supplement other income or stand alone. This is not a DSCR loan topic.

Get the occupancy classification wrong, or hand over an incomplete asset file, and the underwriting stalls before it starts.