From 'Financially Invisible' To Homeowner: How Homewise Helped One Woman Overcome Credit Hurdles
This story was written by Cooper Metts for Albuquerque Business First and ran on May 8th, 2025.
After spending years in the Southeast, Joelda Hope returned to her hometown of Albuquerque in 2017, fulfilling a promise her husband made to her that they would eventually move back to the Land of Enchantment.
Hope and her husband moved from Little Rock to take care of her aging parents in Albuquerque, where she grew up.
Shortly after the move, her mom, dad and husband died.
“I lost my family basically,” Hope said.
Hope inherited her childhood home, and she started renting it to her niece and nephew.
Her niece and nephew’s rent paid for her rent in a temporary living place, as Hope’s ultimate goal was home ownership.
But Hope’s husband, who died in 2021, handled all of their finances, meaning Hope had no credit history and essentially no financial record, she said.
“Big mistake,” Hope said. “I was invisible financially.”
Her lack of credit history, coupled with banks not recognizing the income she received from her niece and nephew’s monthly rent payments, made qualifying for a home loan and homeownership feel out of reach.
In a Bible study, a friend recommended she go to Homewise for help buying a home. So, in early 2024, Hope reached out to Homewise’s Faby Morales, a home purchase advisor.
“What a beautiful introduction that was,” Hope said.
In Hope and Morales’ initial meetings, the two identified Hope’s goals for working with Homewise — buying a new home and keeping the inherited home in the family.
After reviewing Hope’s information, including her income, debt, savings, credit and estimated mortgage payment, Morales and the Homewise team came up with actionable steps they could take to achieve her goals.
The first step was establishing a record of credit.
They helped Hope establish credit by helping her get a secure credit card, making sure she paid monthly payments on time, limiting her debt and obtaining a credit score, Morales said.
The next step was to determine what Hope should do with the home she inherited to best position herself to buy a new home.
Morales and the Homewise team concluded selling the inherited home would help her reach her home ownership goal more than continuing to rent it.
With Hope’s goal of keeping the inherited home in the family, Homewise suggested she sell it to her niece and nephew and offered to help assist them with qualifying for a home loan.
“This is the home I grew up in, and I didn’t want to let it go,” Hope said. “But that phrase — let’s keep it in your family, let’s qualify your niece and nephew — I never even thought of that. So, in the process of qualifying them, that was such satisfaction. Not only did they help me, but now I’ve helped my niece and nephew. That was such as a beautiful thing.”
Concurrently, Hope needed to look for a home she would like to buy and live in. She did this with the weekly help of Homewise Qualifying Broker Ambrose Pena.
After these steps, there was still about a 20% to 22% gap between the price range of a home Hope could purchase and the price range of a home she wanted to purchase, Homewise Chief Operating Officer Elena Gonzales said.
And her niece and nephew had about a 37% gap between the price range of a home they could purchase and the amount they would need to purchase the home Hope inherited, Gonzales said.
So, Homewise’s next steps were to find down-payment assistance sources to fill the gaps between what Hope and her niece and nephew could purchase and what they wanted or needed to purchase.
“That’s really key,” Homewise Chief Creative Officer Rathi Casey said. “Although we work with these other sources, we don’t send her to these other sources to go figure out where her (down-payment assistance) sources fit in this; (we do that).”
Homewise connected Hope with three sources of down-payment assistance to bridge that gap, Gonzales said.
A city of Albuquerque source bridged 53% of the gap, a Federal Home Loan through the Bank of Dallas’s Homebuyer Equity Leverage Partnership (HELP) program bridged 33% of the gap and Homewise itself bridged 13%.
For Hope’s niece and nephew, Homewise identified another three sources of down-payment assistance to close their gap.
A city of Albuquerque source closed 44% of their gap, a Federal Home Loan through the Bank of Dallas’s Homebuyer Equity Leverage Partnership (HELP) program closed 28% of the gap and a Housing New Mexico source closed 28%.
“Do we have a few sources that we can use?” Gonzales asked. “Sometimes we do. We can combine two or three sources (to bridge that gap …). Otherwise, home ownership might be out of reach.”
On Jan. 17, about a year after initially going to Homewise for help, Hope closed on the purchase of her new home, bringing the process of keeping her childhood home in the family and buying a new home to a close.
“The number 17 stands for victory,” Hope said. “That’s how I claim it. That was a victorious day.”
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