Pay off lease to lower DTI? Any negatives?

[unixman]

Currently, I have a $400/mo lease payment being calculated in my DTI. I only owe about $2,000 on the lease... If I were to have my wife (not on the mortgage application), pay off the remainder of the lease from her own private accounts (excluded from the loan app), does anyone see any potential reasons this might be a bad thing?

I figure it'll lower my DTI pretty substantially and shouldn't matter where the payment came from since it's being applied toward a car payment and not the mortgage itself...

Just wanting to get some input before I go ahead and do it...

[unixman]

By the way, this would bring me from a 45% DTI to a 39%...

[Mike_B03]

I've tried this as well and here is what I found out:

That's going to most likely be a no go. Leases are not treated the same way as a car loan, which after it's paid off, you have no more payment. With a lease, most likely than not when the lease ends, you will either lease something else or buy something else, which means some sort of payment will continue.

You can try and argue that after the lease ends, you will buy a used for cash down but it won't matter, they go by the assumption that you will re-lease, because that is what most people do. 

[tooleman694]

Only option is to pay it off and refi it and stretch it out for as long as you can to get the payment lower.

[unixman]

Very good advice. My idea sounded great in theory, but my loan officer got back to me in the meantime and essentially said the same things you've advised.

Oh well, going forward with the 45% and my fingers crossed!

Thank you.