Jamie James

One more thought - Co-sign the safety-first plan: underwriters care about your minimum student loan payment so extra principal payments won’t improve your DTI unless you eliminate a loan entirely, while bigger liquid reserves can strengthen your approval odds. Park the emergency fund and down payment in a high-yield savings or short CD/T-bill ladder so you earn something without risking principal over a two-year horizon. Also don’t obsess over hitting 20% down - paying modest PMI for a while can be cheaper than draining cash and ending up house-poor.

Great tips above. Another common culprit at night is power: when the IR night-vision LEDs kick on a weak adapter or long USB cable can sag and the camera’s Wi‑Fi drops - use the original power brick and a short, thicker cable. Also, if your router has Smart Connect/band steering or Airtime Fairness, turn those off for the camera and give it a DHCP reservation so it stays on 2.4 GHz and reconnects faster.

Use Syncthing to mirror your camera folder to an old laptop at home. Point that laptop to an external drive with versioning turned on and let it run. No subscription, and it runs in the background. Test a restore once so you trust it.