Middle-aged! Self-employed! Mid-divorce! Sure would love to be able to buy a house!

Hello! I think my situation is reasonably clear: I don't make enough money. But I thought I'd run it by the bright minds on here…

SHORT VERSION: I'd like to be more mortgageable in two years, but am trying to work out if that is simply off the cards.

UNNECESSARILY LONG VERSION: I am mid-divorce, house being bought out by my former spouse. We get on very well, split custody of our child 50/50 and live around the corner both from one another and from our child’s school. When it all goes through I’ll have about 60 grand, which I’m not touching until I can use it for a house. But a house around here is about 400 grand (it's a nice area), and I’m self-employed and earned 40 grand last year, so wouldn’t be able to buy on my own.

There aren’t smaller properties available to buy locally really - they all seem to be retirement flats. There are shared-ownership properties a few miles away, however. They say they need a higher household income than I have, but I also have a larger deposit than that is based on, so I think I could do it. The proximity to the school and co-parent are really great now though, and in two years there’s a move to big school which widens the area I’d be happy to live in, and there are shared ownership houses there. They're not super inspiring tbh.

It’s very important to me that my kid doesn’t have one nice place with friends around and one shit one in the middle of nowhere. I currently rent a place that is probably nicer than it needs to be, but there’s also not a lot else around. We’ve made it into a lovely home and I like it. I'm paying 1500/month for it, which is loads, and nearly as much as I'd be paying on a mortgage, but I wouldn't pass the affordability checks to do so.

I’m aware that the most sensible thing to do financially isn’t what I’m doing: if I’d moved into a little flat five miles up the road I could be putting money away, but I didn’t and I’m not. I have no regrets about the decisions I made to smooth the transition and make this stage of my child’s life easier, but need to also think about the future.

I don't think there'll be a partner to buy with.

My rough plan is stay here for two years then try to buy something. There’s not a lot of lifestyle cuts I can make really, I lead a pretty mundane existence, and where I live now works for me. But I want to think about what I could do to put myself in a better position when that time rolls around, besides "earn a lot more money".

- I was always told the maximum one could borrow was 4x to 4.5x their annual income. Even if I doubled my income I'd only just make it (we barely made it as a pair). While I'd love to bypass the shared ownership thing if I can, due to the available ones being a bit shit, should I just accept that they're my only option and I'm not going to be able to buy a house "properly"?

- I might have access to a bit more money. If it’s the difference between being able to get somewhere or not, there’s potentially about 50 grand I could get my hands on from my family. Would having a deposit of, let’s say 100 grand rather than 60, open any doors beyond lowering the repayable amount?

- ⁠Being self-employed isn’t something lenders like, I’m aware of that. But there’s a bit of nuance to my income: I'm an author, and my work keeps generating royalties and getting sold/licenced to other countries without me doing anything, so stuff I did a few years ago is still bringing money in, and the work I'm doing now will bring money in for many years, etc. Like, last year was bad and I lost a lot of working time to my life falling apart in a way which can't happen again, but (some) money still showed up which was a bit of a lifesaver. It's slow, and I've only just got to the point where it's working for me, but I'm not starting from zero every year like I used to be. Is that a conversation I can have with a mortgage provider or are they unlikely to care beyond what the year-end numbers are?

- Would I be more mortgageable if I turned myself into a company? I have reservations about doing so, and feel like the "start a company, pay oneself a low monthly wage and collect the rest as dividends" model wouldn't be useful in this situation but it seems worth asking.

Any/all thoughts would be really welcome. Again, I think it's all fairly clear what I should do (earn more, do the shared ownership thing, should bite the bullet and do it earlier but don't want to) but writing this down has been helpful if nothing else: I think the sweatiness and desperation in some of it is quite clear and kind of answers itself. I apologise for the length, and for using a personal finance forum like it's a therapist. Thank you! Hey, isn't it warm?!?!