The Four Hard Stops

Most of the HōMI-Score is a matter of degree. A lower down payment costs you points, not the whole verdict. A shorter time horizon costs you points, not the whole verdict. Four conditions work differently: if any one of them is true, the verdict is forced to NOT YET regardless of what the rest of the numbers say.

That's a deliberate design choice, not an oversight. Averages hide danger. A high score built from strong credit and a solid down payment can still describe a household one bad month away from crisis, if the number that actually protects against a bad month is missing. Hard-stops exist so that one severe risk can't be diluted into invisibility by three unrelated strengths.

Debt-to-income above 50% means more than half your gross income already has somewhere to go before you've bought anything. It leaves almost no margin for surprises — a slow month, a repair, a gap between jobs. This is covered in full detail in our article Understanding Your DTI; the short version is that above this line, the math itself is the risk, independent of every other factor.

This is a narrower, more specific ratio than DTI — principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and HOA dues (PITI + HOA), measured against gross monthly income alone. Above roughly 45%, one bad month doesn't just strain your budget. It threatens the roof over your head directly, because housing is the one payment you can't easily reduce or defer without real consequences.

This hard-stop protects against a specific and common trap: a household that looks fine on paper-wide DTI because other debts are low, but is nonetheless committing an outsized share of income to the house itself. Low overall debt doesn't offset an oversized mortgage payment.

Runway is the number of months your essential expenses are covered if income stopped tomorrow, held in something liquid and accessible — not a retirement account, not the down payment itself. Below one month, there is no cushion between you and the first real surprise homeownership brings, and there's always a first surprise.

This hard-stop protects against the single most common story behind post-purchase financial stress: not the mortgage payment itself, but the water heater, the roof, the year property taxes jump, arriving with nothing set aside to absorb them. For the full mechanics of what counts as runway and how much is enough, see our article Emergency Runway Mechanics.

620 is roughly where conventional mortgage pricing shifts meaningfully against a borrower. Below it, available loan products narrow and the rates offered climb — sometimes enough that the added interest cost over the life of the loan quietly undoes the value of the purchase itself. This protects against a decision that looks affordable at the offer stage but becomes expensive over 15 to 30 years of a higher rate.

None of these four exist to shame anyone. They exist because some risks are severe enough that no amount of strength elsewhere compensates for them — the same logic behind a building code line that doesn't bend just because the rest of the structure is sound. Not yet is not no. It is clarity. It is protection.

Every hard-stop is also a to-do list. A DTI hard-stop points at debt to pay down. A runway hard-stop points at savings to build. A credit hard-stop points at a specific, time-bound project. Build First is not failure. It is the map — and these four thresholds are usually the first four lines on it.