The Four Hard Stops

Most of the Decision Readiness Score is a matter of degree. A lower down payment costs you ground, not the whole verdict. A shorter time horizon costs you ground, 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 picture says.

That's a deliberate design choice, not an oversight. Averages hide danger. A strong-looking score built from solid credit and a real 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 unrelated strengths.

We don't publish the exact lines. Naming them would tell you how to answer around them instead of how to fix the underlying condition — and the point of a protective signal is that it can't be gamed. What we can tell you is what each condition looks like and how to build past it.

When monthly debt payments take too large a share of gross income, almost nothing is left for surprises — a slow month, a repair, a gap between jobs. The mechanics of the ratio itself are covered in full detail in our article Understanding Your DTI; the short version is that past a certain line, the math itself is the risk, independent of every other factor.

This is a narrower, more specific ratio than DTI — the full housing payment, including taxes, insurance, and any association dues, measured against gross monthly income alone. Commit too large a share of the paycheck to the house itself and 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 overall 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. When there is essentially nothing set aside, 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 to absorb them. For the full mechanics of what counts as runway and how much is enough, see our article Emergency Runway Mechanics.

There is a band where mortgage pricing shifts meaningfully against a borrower: 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. When your credit sits in the band lenders price as high-risk, HōMI treats the decision as premature no matter how the rest of the picture looks. This protects against a decision that looks affordable at the offer stage but becomes expensive over decades 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 debt hard-stop points at balances 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 clearing a hard-stop is usually the first line on it.