Mortgage options and likelyhood post shortsale

[nemobeach]

We closed our short sale in August of 2009, it had 120 day lates - on both the first and second.  We bought it in CA, my husband lost his job and we moved to TX for work.  We tried to rent it out, but with $2000 in monthly negative cash flow we just couldn't keep up and ended up having to sell it short.  When we moved to TX in 2009, while renting out the CA house we bought another home.  His company moved us to VA and we've been renting out the TX house and renting our primary residence.  This April we were finally able to sell our TX rental and would like to buy in the next 9 months. In August we will be 4 years out from our SS. We have no other negatives on our credit, and our scores on myfico are around 720-730.  I have a couple of questions:

1. What are the loan options out there?  I know of FHA, we don't have 10% (we have 5% down) are there any conventional loans out there as an option with 5% down?

2. I've read that people have been having issues with the coding of their short sale - would a loan officer be able to look at our credit report and discern whether that is an issue for us.  Can this be fixed?

3. Is talking to a LO too early as we most likely won't be able to buy until next Spring as we still have 10 months left on our lease.

4. Are people sucessful getting a mortgage post SS?

Here are our financials: Annual salary 135,000, monthly debts about 900 (auto loans - paid off in 18 months), no credit card balance, about $17,000 available for down payment and closing (we might have another 7,000 in April once we get out tax return - this is related to selling our rental at a loss). We are looking at a purchase price of 290-310K.

Thanks

[HouseBuyerGuy]

Be careful, if you sell your rental at a loss, they might deduct that from your income calculation.

[nemobeach]

Are you saying for debt to income ratio/ income qualification that our capitol loss on our rental could go against our income for qualifying? I never thought of that.   Yikes. I'm not sure how much we will be taking - I think we will have $30,000 in suspended losses from not taking the losses for the past 3 years due to our AGI, plus the 10K loss from the sale.

[HouseBuyerGuy]

Well, put it this way. They removed all money I contributed to a tax-free health savings account as income. Yep, they removed 5,000 as income because I was reponsible enough to make sure I could pay my wifes pregnancy bills for the year. If I didn't take out a FSA with the 5K and still spent the money on the pregnancy (though actually had less money since I paid taxes on it) it still would have counted as income. Make sense? Nope. That's just how they do things...