If your lease is up at the end of August, you’re probably too late to find a house to move into by September 1st. If everything goes perfectly smoothly and as quickly as possible, it still takes a solid month to deal with all the paperwork involved in buying a house. And if you’re looking at a foreclosure situation, things will not go smoothly or as quickly as possible. This is probably the best market to buy a house in that we’ll see for a while: interest rates are low, and there are a lot of people trying to sell. So it might be worth your while to start the process and meanwhile see if you can get a one-month extension to your lease. Your landlord might be willing. There are loan programs (most significantly FHA guaranteed loans) that are available to people even with less-than-perfect credit. The cutoff for those loans is usually around a FICO score of 620, and the evaluation is based more on your employment history, your income, and your income-to-debt ratio than it is on your credit rating. You’ll still need at least 3.5% down, though – the days of no-money-down home loans ended with the credit crunch.