Matador Lending NMLS #1871433 · Licensed in TX, CA, GA, FL
Masala Loans
Practical advice on H-1B, EAD, ITIN, and NRI home loans — written for borrowers navigating U.S. mortgages.
Dallas is the second-largest Indian-American metropolitan area in the country, with roughly 270,000 people, behind New York and just ahead of San Francisco's 260,000. That is Pew Research's 2023 data,
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
Your principal and interest are fixed for thirty years. Your total monthly payment is not, and in Texas the second year is where that distinction stops being theoretical. The call we get every January
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
Start with the disclosure that belongs at the top rather than buried in a footer: Masala Loans does not originate Sharia-compliant home financing contracts. This post is educational. It is not an offe
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
Zillow will tell you the roof age, the HVAC install year, the elementary school rating and the exact square footage of the third bedroom. It will not tell you which way the front door faces. Neither w
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
The purchase contract your agent sends over has a blank line near the top for the closing date. Most buyers let the agent fill it in — thirty days out, forty-five if the loan is complicated. If your f
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
The gift letter has one line in it that does all the work: the donor states that no repayment is expected. Not "repayment is flexible." Not "repayment when you are able." No repayment is expected, in
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
"My parents want to be on the house." We hear that sentence several times a week, and it means at least three different things depending on who is saying it. Before anyone signs anything, separate the
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
The common belief is that if your parents are moving in with you and helping with the down payment, their money is complicated. Foreign account, no US income, they will be living in the house — surely
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
A cousin doing his master's at UT Dallas has been paying you $800 a month for the front bedroom for the last year and a half. He pays by Zelle, on the third, every month. You are buying a house and yo
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Ten. That is the ceiling, and it is written down: Fannie Mae's Selling Guide B2-2-03 says DU allows a maximum of 10 financed properties for second home and investment borrowers. Almost nobody in our m
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
The question arrives in the same shape every time, usually from somebody whose brother-in-law already did it. Can I just buy the rental in my LLC? And the answer depends entirely on which lender you a
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
A loan that does not ask for your income sounds like 2006. That instinct is healthy, and most borrowers who hear about DSCR financing for the first time have exactly that reaction: this is how the las
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Take Arun, a composite of files we see in Katy. He earns \(132,000 a year as an engineering manager, his own house carries a \)3,600 payment, and he has a car note and a student loan. He found a $320,
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
DSCR stands for debt service coverage ratio, and the entire loan program rests on one line of arithmetic: DSCR = gross monthly rent ÷ PITIA PITIA is principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and associat
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Every Diwali party has the one uncle who says it with total confidence. Beta, you can't own rental property on an H-1B. They'll cancel your visa. He has been saying it for a decade, and he is wrong. H
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Four families own a restaurant together. Each put in a quarter of the capital, one of them runs it day to day, the other three show up on weekends and look at the numbers once a quarter. Everybody get
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
$6,000. That is the number at which your bank statements start generating homework, if your qualifying income is \(12,000 a month. Not \)10,000. Not the $10,000 currency transaction reporting figure e
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Look at the top of your contract. If it says "corp-to-corp" or "C2C," your mortgage file just got three times longer than your colleague's, and the two of you make exactly the same money doing exactly
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
The SBA 504 program will not fund working capital. It will not fund inventory. And it explicitly excludes "speculation or investment in rental real estate." That last phrase has killed more hotel deal
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Two loans. Two underwriters. Two sets of paperwork. Almost nothing carries from one file to the other, and the fastest way to lose three weeks is to assume it does. You bought the station with a comme
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Fourteen months is not two years, and the general expectation in conventional underwriting is two years. That is the honest starting point, and any loan officer who tells you otherwise without asking
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
"We need two years of tax returns." Every self-employed borrower in America has heard that sentence, usually delivered as though it were carved into a wall somewhere. For a large number of the busines
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Pull out your Schedule C. The one your CPA filed, the two-page form attached to your 1040, with "Profit or Loss From Business" across the top. Most business owners read one number on it: line 31, net
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
Twelve or twenty-four. That is the first decision in a bank statement file, and it moves the qualifying income more than almost anything else you will do. A bank statement loan does not read your tax
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
Your CPA did exactly what you hired her to do. Depreciation on the coolers and the fuel dispensers. Business use of the home office. Amortization on the goodwill you paid for when you bought the store
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
PUBLISHER NOTE: Apurva — this draft intentionally omits specific dollar caps for the 203(k) Limited program and the exact renovation-cost threshold that triggers a required HUD consultant, because nei
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
PUBLISHER NOTE: Apurva — this draft deliberately contains no county-specific FHA limit figures, because per-county numbers were not in the verified fact pack. Before publishing, pull the current 2026
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
A borrower called us in August with a printed amortization schedule and a highlighted row. He had reached 78% of his original purchase price, four years into an FHA loan, and wanted to know where to s
Apurva Sanghavi · · 8 min read
At a 740 credit score, conventional usually wins. Not always, and not by a trivial margin either way, but usually — and the reason is structural rather than a matter of shopping harder. FHA charges ev
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Take your green card out of your wallet and turn it over. The back carries the card number and the machine-readable band, and an FHA underwriter is going to ask for both sides of it. That is not paper
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
"Who pays closing costs" is one of the most searched real estate questions in the country, and the honest answer annoys people: mostly, whoever the contract says. Very little of what you will hear des
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Your offer gets accepted on a Tuesday. On Wednesday your agent asks you to deliver a check for $10,000, made out to a title company you have never heard of, within three days. Nobody has explained who
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
$832,750. That is the 2026 baseline conforming loan limit for a one-unit property, announced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency on November 25, 2025. It is up $26,250 from 2025, an increase driven
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Somewhere in your closing package is a one-page private mortgage insurance disclosure with two dates printed on it. Most buyers sign it, file it, and never look at it again. Those two dates are the on
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Three percent down is real. The income cap attached to it is the part that never makes it into the WhatsApp forward. HomeReady, Fannie Mae's low-down-payment program, and Home Possible, Freddie Mac's
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Thirty-two thousand rupees leaves your account on the fifth of every month, and has since 2019. It is the education loan your father co-signed at a bank in Pune so you could do the master's degree tha
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
One W-2 earner. One spouse on an H-4 with no work authorization, or with an approved H-4 EAD and no job yet. A car each, a couple of credit cards, and a preapproval letter that came back smaller than
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Your loan officer emails you a one-line update and it contains a word you have never seen used this way: Refer. Not denied. Not approved. Refer. That word is the automated underwriting system telling
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Six months. That is the earliest a FICO score can exist for you, and almost nobody arriving in this country is told that on day one. They get told "build credit," which is advice the way "get in shape
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
No. Your CIBIL score does not work in the United States. You deserve that in the first line instead of four paragraphs down. But the reason matters, because it tells you exactly what to do next — and
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
The L-1 transferee arrives in a strange position. You have eight years at the same multinational, a title that took a decade to earn, a salary that puts you comfortably in the top decile of your new z
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
Twelve years. That is the sort of wait an EB-2 or EB-3 India filer is quoted when they ask their attorney about a priority date, and it converts "wait for the green card" from a strategy into a decisi
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Ask around at a Diwali party and someone will tell you about a cousin who lost his job, lost his status, and lost his house to the bank. That story is the single most expensive misunderstanding in thi
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
A borrower in Irving sent his lender a photo of his visa stamp on a Tuesday. On Thursday the processor asked for the I-94. The following Monday, the I-797. Two weeks later, underwriting wanted the bac
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
There are three boxes in Section 1 of the Form 1003, and ticking the wrong one is not mortgage fraud. Misrepresenting which one is true is a different matter entirely. Yaar, most borrowers we talk to
Apurva Sanghavi · · 10 min read
You are looking at an I-797A with a validity end date four months out. Your extension was filed in June. Your realtor sent three listings this morning and you have not opened them, because someone tol
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Same borrower. Same W-2s. Same 748 score. Same I-797. Declined on a Tuesday, approved on a Thursday, by two lenders eleven miles apart. Nothing about the file changed. What changed was whose credit po
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Three phrases get used as if they were synonyms. "Non-citizen." "Non-resident alien." "Non-permanent resident." Borrowers swap them freely, and so do plenty of loan officers. They are not synonyms. Th
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Your loan officer called back and said your O-1 "isn't on the approved list." Ask him to send you the list. He will not send it, because it does not exist. Fannie Mae has never published a roster of a
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
On March 26, 2025, HUD issued Mortgagee Letter 2025-09. One sentence in it ended FHA financing for every H-1B, L-1, O-1 and TN holder in the United States: "This ML removes the Non-permanent Residents
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Your Employment Authorization Document — the plastic card in your wallet that says you’re legally allowed to work in the United States — is not a barrier to homeownership. But depending on which type
Apurva Sanghavi · · 8 min read
You make $250,000 a year. A third of that is RSUs. Your base salary alone puts you in a comfortable bracket, but it’s the vesting stock that makes you feel, as the kids say, built different. Then you
Apurva Sanghavi · · 8 min read
Beta, we bought your down payment. Now go buy a house. If you’ve had this conversation — or are about to — you’re not alone. Across the South Asian diaspora in America, family wealth flows across the
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read
Yes. Full stop. You can absolutely get a mortgage on an H1B visa in 2026. The idea that you need a green card or citizenship to buy a home in the United States is one of the most persistent myths in t
Apurva Sanghavi · · 9 min read