I think we may have just set ourselves back another 2 years in our quest to upgrade our house, and I'm really in a funk about it. 
We've been wanting to move up from our "starter home" for 2 years now; we actually had a contract on our house and were about 5 minutes from signing a contract on a new house in 2006 when we got word that DH's company was being bought by BofA (the layoff kings). Since we figured that couldn't be good, we stopped everything & hunkered down to see what happened.
Sure enough, DH's department was closed and he was given a severance package in January. This week he started a new job as the sales manager of a motorcycle dealership. He knows the owner personally, and has great confidence in the success of the dealership and the income potential. After running the numbers he projects that he'll be making at least what he was making before, if not more. Unfortunately it's 100% commission, and constitutes a change in job field (from mortgage banking to retail - though he is still a manager).
I'm worried about how this will impact our quest for a new mortgage. I know there generally employment requirements around length of employment, change in job fields, and commission income. He seems to think we can get around this with a stated income mortgage. I'm wondering if that's really true, given the current mortgage/credit crisis - are no-doc loans even still available? If they are, do they have crazy asset/reserve requirements? We're looking in the 350k range, and our original plan was to put down 10% and have 3-4 months in reserve.
We'd be looking to put our house on the market in about 6 months or so. Other than this income issue, our credit is good - the only major issue is util, and as we're aggressively paying down CC debt, I expect to be pulling mid-700 scores by the end of the year. So what do you think? Are we stuck for 2 years while he builds commission income history? Or is hope still alive?
