<prompt> Human: Hey PF, my wife and I desperately want to buy a home as soon as possible. We have been living in apartments for over a decade now, and we are done with it. We would like to provide our daughter and two dogs with a much better lifestyle, and we feel like our monthly rent payments need to be generating some equity for us. That being said, I think we might be rushing into it. Heres our current situation:Income Me: 5,656mo gross; 4,260mo netOccasional Overtime: 456 gross; 320 net per shift, typically 1-2 shifts per month, but possibly 0 aka not reliableIncome Wife: 0Savings: 800Rent: 1,169Bills excl. debt: 650moRegular Spending: 1,200moCredit Cards: 7800 balance; 17 avg APR; 215mo min paymentsAuto Lease: 276mo, ends in December 2018Personal Loan paid medical bills: 3600 bal; 11 APR; 157moPrivate Student Loans Wife: 32,000 bal; 10 avg APR; 345mo paymentFedLoans Me: 58,600 bal; 0moFedLoans Wife: 46,932 bal; 0moOk. So as you can see, Im making enough to pay all monthly expenses and have about 250 left over each month more when I get overtime. Ive been putting 100 in savings each month and paying the rest on credit cards. I have an incoming summer bonus and tuition reimbursement online MBA from work, totaling about 5000 net. This will all go to credit cards. I expect to have them completely paid off by August at the latest. After that, we intend to turn our attention towards the personal loan and knocking that out hopefully by December at the latest. My original plan from then on was to attack my wifes private student loans there are four, two of them have me as a cosigner 206mo for D2I calculation, however our close friends just bought a house down the street from us and we are really itching to get out there and buy our first house as well. My wife is attending school part time right now we just moved here last fall so she doesnt qualify for in-state tuition yet but intends to attend school full time in August. Her FedLoans are in forbearance through September, at which point they will go into in-school deferment. We intend to pay for the remainder of her education with scholarships and grants or out-of-pocket if we have to. I am currently attending an online MBA program that I am roughly one third of the way through. I am paying for this degree with FedLoans. My next disbursement will be in July, and I intend to only pay for the 9-week class 1950 and reject any student refund amount. This process will repeat with additional 9-week courses in September, November, and February, although in February I intend to retain the refund to pay for an additional class in April that FedLoans dont typically cover. All in all, I expect to borrow an additional 9,750 in FedLoans for this school year. After that, I will only have two more classes to obtain my degree, and I intend to pay for those out-of-pocket.We live in a LCOL area, and all of the houses in this area qualify for USDA 0 down loans. Right now, my individual debt-to-income ratio is 46, which exceeds the maximum for USDA 41. However once the credit cards are gone and we turn in the leased car in December, I should have a D2I low enough to qualify. We would be buying a house in the 160,000-200,000 range, which I estimate will come with a 1100mo-1300mo mortgage.Thats our situation right now. What do you think? Are we crazy for pushing to buy a house with all this debt looming over us? On one hand, I feel like we should wait until we both graduate and my wife gets a full-time job, and we have an emergency fund of some kind. On the other hand, I will likely get promoted within a year which would be awesome but may put us over the income maximum for USDA, meaning well need to go the traditional route and save up probably 30k or so. One thing I could do - and this might be extreme and somewhat not legal is to accept the student refund amounts in July and September and use them to refinance the personal loan lowering my D2I and look into turning in the leased car 3-4 months early I think if you do this, they just send you a bill for all remaining payments, eliminating the lease from your credit report, and subsequently D2I calculation. This would bring my D2I down low enough that we would qualify in October which is when our current apt lease ends. This seems risky. Doesnt the bank check your statements to see how youre managing your money? Will a move like this seem dishonest to them?Sorry for the long post. Let me know what you guys think.Edit: Thank you guys for safely talking me out of it. Im going to finish paying off credit cards and then start building up my emergency fund to at least 10-12k. Once we both graduate and my wife starts working, well start looking for a house. I knew it wasnt a good idea to start looking now, so I appreciate your helping me talk myself out of a bad decision. Thank you ugyaradostwister for helping me realize what a poor financial decision 0 down is anyway and that even after the monthly increase in equity, its still cheaper to rent now and save up to buy later.  <response>: You are over 100K in debt with a leased car. You have a ton of credit card debt. You are broke. You have no savings.You are a job loss or illness away from defaulting on your student loans. If you add this in, youll have a foreclosure too.You are nowhere close to buying. 