Maximize Your Benefits. Optimize Your Life.

August 27, 2026

A couple of weeks ago a friend texted me a feature request for the housing tools. He's buying another house, and he'd been running the same numbers over and over in different scenarios (using TBV tools, of course): his salary, his VA rating converted into dollars, his wife's income, what that adds up to as a monthly mortgage he could live with.

Then he said the part that made me build it:

I've heard some version of that sentence from a lot of veterans. The pre-approval comes back, the number is enormous, and it feels like a compliment. It isn't. It's a ceiling. And for a rated veteran, that ceiling is built on math that almost nobody explains to you.

So that's tool #21. It went live today.

Here's the part I didn't fully understand until I pulled the VA Lender's Handbook for this build.

Your VA disability compensation is tax-free. When a lender runs your debt-to-income ratio, they don't count it at face value. They gross it up to 125%, to make it comparable to taxable salary. So $4,319 a month in compensation (100% with a spouse and one kid, 2026 rates) shows up on the lender's worksheet as roughly $5,400 of qualifying income.

That's not a trick, and it's not a lender getting creative. It's in the VA's own Lender's Handbook, in the instructions for the loan analysis form: use 125 percent of the borrower's non-taxable income when grossing up. It's the reason a rated veteran gets approved for much more house than the same salary alone would support.

(VA Lender's Handbook, Pamphlet 26-7, Chapter 4, Topic 9, Form 26-6393 instructions.)

The second thing nobody tells you: the VA doesn't underwrite on DTI alone. There's a second test called residual income, and it's the one that matters.

Residual income is what's left each month after taxes, Social Security, every debt payment, the full housing payment, and a maintenance estimate of 14 cents per square foot of the house. The VA publishes minimum dollar amounts by region, family size, and loan size. A family of four in the South on a loan over $80,000 needs $1,003 left over. In the West it's $1,117.

Two things about that test that change how you should think about buying:

1. It uses real cash, not grossed-up income. The 25% bump that inflates your DTI number does not exist here. Residual income is designed to confirm you have actual dollars left after the mortgage. So a veteran can look great on the ratio and still fail the test, or pass the ratio comfortably and have the residual line be the real limit.

2. The house itself is an input. Fourteen cents per square foot means a 2,800 square foot house costs you $392 a month in the residual calculation before you've paid a dime of utilities. Bigger house, harder test. Twice.

And here's the part that works in your favor, straight from the Handbook: a DTI over 41% can still close if your residual income beats the requirement by at least 20%, or if the ratio is only high because of tax-free income. Those two exceptions were basically written for disabled veterans, and I'd never seen either one mentioned in a consumer calculator.

I went looking for "residual income" across all twenty tools I'd built before this one. Zero hits. That's fixed now.

Quick break for this issue's sponsor (it's what keeps every tool free), then the tool itself:

Is payday still a few days away, but the bills aren't waiting? We've all been there. That's why there's Klover — a cash advance of up to $750* from your upcoming paycheck, with no credit check and no late fees. Ever.

Cash in 3 Easy Steps

No credit check. No late fees. No catch — just a little breathing room until payday.

Get Started Now

^{*Not all users will qualify. Advances range from $25–$750; average advance is $170. Express transfer fees may apply.}

You enter your income stack (salary, rating, spouse, state), your monthly debts, and the size of house you're looking at. The tool runs the lender's math the way the Handbook describes it and gives you:

Then it does the thing every Better Veteran tool does. It runs the same inputs at every rating rung and shows you what your next claim is worth in house.

If you got pre-approved and the number feels wrong, there's a mode for exactly that. Enter what they gave you and it shows what that payment does to your month, next to the number that leaves you room to live.

And if the real question is whether you should buy at all right now, there's a seven-question readiness check. Most veterans can qualify. The reasons to wait are almost always about life, not money: how long you've been in your job, whether you'll be in the same city in three years, how much is left in savings after closing. Those answers don't touch the lender's number. They tighten the comfortable one: a yellow read pulls your comfort share down a few points, red pulls it further, and thin savings after closing pull it further still. Then your net worth caps it, because the same house against $150K of net worth and the same house against $2M are completely different risks, and rent-vs-buy math never shows that. The tool won't let the comfortable number sit where a 10% dip in home value erases more than a third of everything you own.

Same deal as every tool I ship. I'd rather you trust it than be impressed by it:

Get pre-approved by more than one VA lender. Then ask each of them to show you the residual income line on their worksheet, not just the max price. If one of them will hand you the VA Form 26-6393, that's the whole story on one page.

And run your numbers here first, so you walk in knowing which rule caps you and what moves it.

What did your pre-approval come back at, and what did you actually buy? And if you have VA loan questions this tool didn't answer, ask me those too. Hit reply. I read every one, and the gap between those two numbers is the story I'm collecting now.

Talk soon,
Zak

P.S. The readiness questions in this tool are a two-minute version of the first thing I do on a 1:1 Transition Planning call. If "should I buy" is really one piece of a bigger "what's my plan" question, two of the five founding spots are still open. The application is at tools.thebetterveteran.com/work-with-me. I read every one myself.

See all 21 free tools →