We'll be straight with you: this is a hard one, and we don't have a clean workaround. Since the post-2008 reforms, ability-to-repay rules require a lender to document that you can actually afford the payment on any consumer-purpose mortgage secured by a dwelling. That reach covers primary residences and second homes alike; the main carve-outs are business-purpose lending (a true investment property, for example), reverse mortgages, home equity lines, and short-term bridge loans. So if the debt-to-income doesn't work on paper, most standard doors stay closed regardless of how much equity you're sitting on. The usual escape hatches don't fit your situation. Bank-statement loans exist for self-employed borrowers whose real income is under-documented; they substitute business deposits for tax-return income, and there's no hidden business income to surface here. Hard-money lenders lending against the home you live in have to verify ability to repay too, a standard tightened after enforcement actions against lenders who wrote loans with no realistic path to repayment. The structure people sometimes reach for is a business-purpose loan, framed around financing a business rather than your residence, which sits outside the consumer ability-to-repay rules. It typically carries meaningfully higher interest, and it doesn't solve the underlying problem, since the income to service it still has to come from somewhere. Given all that, weigh the other routes to your equity too: selling and downsizing, or a reverse mortgage if you meet the age requirement (reverse mortgages sit outside these ability-to-repay rules). Talk those through with a lender who handles these cases, and confirm current guidelines, before assuming a mortgage is the right tool at all.