Mortgages for Corporate Executives

Vested RSU and PSU income reported on your W-2 (Box 1) counts when supported by a two-year vesting history. Under Fannie Mae Selling Guide B3-3.1-09, future RSU income can also count when the vesting schedule is documented and a prior-year sale history confirms the executive actually receives and uses the value. We document with the equity-plan agreement, the vesting schedule, and (for public companies) the proxy filing. Unvested RSUs don’t count toward income but may count toward reserves.

Non-qualified deferred-compensation plans under IRC Section 409A are common at senior levels. Deferred bonus that has been credited to your account but not yet paid is documented via the plan agreement and election form. With a two-year history of consistent deferral patterns, this can count as continuing income. Where it cannot count as income, the accumulated deferred balance may count toward reserves and asset-depletion calculations.

Each piece is treated separately. The sign-on cash bonus is W-2 income (one-time event, supportable with offer letter). Sign-on equity (if immediately vested) is current W-2 income. A forgivable retention note shows as debt on your credit report and an annual forgiveness amount as W-2 income. The relocation gross-up creates a one-time W-2 spike that we exclude from the qualifying base-comp number. We’ve seen most major employers’ structures and know how each one flows into AUS.

Not as income. Unvested equity doesn’t qualify under either agency or Non-QM income-documentation rules. But two paths exist: (1) unvested shares may count toward reserves if the lender accepts them at a discounted valuation; (2) timing the mortgage around a known liquidity event (IPO, tender offer, secondary sale) can convert unvested equity into marketable securities eligible for asset-depletion. Asset-depletion typically credits 84-360 months of implied income, so $1M of post-tax proceeds can produce $3K-$12K of monthly qualifying income depending on the program.

Yes, with a signed offer letter. Fannie Mae Selling Guide B3-3.1-01 allows qualifying on a future employment contract starting within a defined window (typically 60-90 days). The offer letter must show base salary and start date; the new employer must verify the offer. For relocation scenarios, this lets you close before you start and avoid bridge financing or temp housing. We’ve done this for executives at hedge funds, wirehouses, tech companies, and Fortune 500 corporates.

Carried interest is typically reported on Schedule K-1 from the partnership (fund) and may have multiple line items: ordinary income, capital gains, guaranteed payments. Fannie Mae B3-3.4-02 allows partnership distributive share to count with a two-year history. Capital gains generally don’t count as recurring income; ordinary income and guaranteed payments do. For private-equity, hedge-fund, and law-firm partners, we coordinate with your CPA to model the recurring component correctly.

Depends on the lender. Conventional lenders typically require a two-year average, which under-tells a recent promotion. Trailing-12-month qualifying is allowed by some lenders with a comp-structure-change attestation letter from the employer. The cleanest path is often to wait until you have 60-90 days of pay history at the new comp level, then qualify on current-run-rate. For executive comp in particular, we often run the file through a lender that explicitly accepts current-comp documentation for documented promotions.

Conventional Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (when W-2 plus documented RSU/bonus history hits the qualifying number), Jumbo and Super-Jumbo (for purchase prices over the conforming limit, common in Florida coastal markets), Asset-Depletion (for executives with substantial post-tax investment portfolios from prior liquidity events), Non-QM bank-statement (rare at this comp tier but useful for K-1-heavy or partnership-heavy borrowers), and Portfolio loans from private banks (for super-jumbo or relationship-driven needs). We pick the program after we read your full comp package, not before.