Short sales can take 6 months or longer easily. If you're planning to look for short sales, be prepared to be patient, and look for an agent that is experienced specifically with short sales.
ETA: Also, regarding your bartending income, when you say not verifiable, what do you mean? Have you not been working the job long enough to have filed taxes? If you have filed, but you aren't claiming the income accurately, you're going to be stuck with whatever you've been claiming as income. At least that is my impression, I don't have any direct experience with it.
Starting Score: ~500 (12/01/2008)
+1 in the west also.
@tooleman694 wrote:In my area DFW. Its a sellers market.
When I sold my house, the buyers paid all the closing costs.
I had a couple things I had to cover, but it didnt add up to much.
@Xtina0508 wrote:That is correct. I pay taxes on the hourly wage I get paid and our credit card tips (paychecks are $0 because we are over taxed on our tips so we don't owe $49854589495840 at years end). I don't pay taxes on the cash tips I receive. So, I guess that extra reported income helps - but it's only a very small portion of what I actually make.
I've been with the company for 3 years.
The point is that you are supposed to pay taxes on those tips. You're supposed to declare them. I don't want to get into an argument about how you file your taxes, but you won't be able to convince a lender to just trust you that you really make more than you report to the IRS.
ETA: I waited tables in college. And I'm not saying I was scrupulous about the accuracy of my tips. I really don't mean this in a judgmental way. But you have to understand that a lender isn't going to just wink and accept that you actually have more money coming in than you are declaring. They're going to go by your reported income.