# Reserves

> Reserves tests whether the promised payment can be supported by the borrower's resources and obligations

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:real-estate-mortgage:borrower-underwriting:reserves` |
| Family | Borrower Underwriting |
| Domain | Economics |
| Era | Institutional Age → Agentic Age |
| Kind | concept |
| Archetype | The Field |
| Claim layers | empirical, cultural_historical, synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory |

## What it is

Reserves is a concept in the Borrower Underwriting family, defined here by the function it performs in the property system rather than by label alone.

## What it actually does

Reserves tests whether the promised payment can be supported by the borrower's resources and obligations.

## Why it exists

It exists because place is unique and immovable while law, capital, information, and human lives must still coordinate around it across time.

## System mechanics

- **Who uses it:** owner, occupant, buyer, seller, lender, investor, steward, regulator
- **Incentives:** access, certainty, control, value, continuity
- **Inputs:** place, people, records, rules, resources, time
- **Outputs:** rights, constraints, uses, relationships, consequences
- **Dependencies:** Land, Authority, Information, Capital, Time

## Archetypal reading

- **Essence:** Reserves tests whether the promised payment can be supported by the borrower's resources and obligations
- **Gift:** Clarity about reserves makes a hidden allocation of place, time, authority, value, or risk available for deliberate choice.
- **Wound / Shadow:** When reserves is treated as neutral or inevitable, its costs can be shifted to people who hold less information, authority, liquidity, or mobility.
- **Failure mode:** The failure mode appears when reserves is stale, opaque, mispriced, misrecorded, overextended, or applied outside the conditions that made it useful.

## Lenses

- **Personal:** Notice where reserves appears as a structure in your own commitments: what is held, promised, priced, protected, excluded, or deferred?
- **Business:** Reserves reveals a handoff among information, authority, incentives, operating work, and capital. Make the owner of each handoff explicit.
- **Financial:** Reserves changes the timing, priority, comparability, liquidity, or distribution of cash flow and risk.
- **Property:** Reserves changes how a physical place can be used, valued, financed, transferred, occupied, maintained, or reclaimed.
- **Community:** Reserves can create benefits inside one parcel while exporting costs or opportunity to neighbors, institutions, or future residents.

## Divination

The Field enters the reading through Reserves. The issue is not only what is visible; it is which map of ownership, time, risk, authority, or belonging currently governs the situation.

**Question:** What changes when Reserves becomes the unit of analysis?

**Guidance:** Shift scale, clock, stakeholder, boundary, and claim layer before choosing a move.

## Game function

Creates a graph move that changes the active map. Initiative 2.

## Relationships

- **Loan Officer transfers into Reserves.** Loan Officer transfers into Reserves through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Employment is administered through Reserves.** Employment is administered through Reserves through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Reserves depends on Gift Funds.** Reserves depends on Gift Funds through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Reserves is governed by Title Policy.** Reserves is governed by Title Policy through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.

## Oppositions

- Use Value versus Exchange Value
- Speed versus Diligence

## Historical lineage and regulatory context

Read Reserves through the lineage of Borrower Underwriting: earlier customary or local arrangements became recorded, standardized, financed, regulated, digitized, or contested over time.

Rules vary by jurisdiction and transaction. Use the cited primary sources as starting points and verify current local law, program guides, contracts, and professional standards before operational use.

## Visual direction

Text-free rounded-square enamel artifact for Reserves: one dominant symbolic mechanism with a restrained secondary counterforce; vitreous midnight enamel, blackened steel, warm brass, copper accents, mortgage-paper cream, deep green, slate, and sky blue.

## Engine output / Sentinel handoff

The generative interpretation above is preserved as Engine Output. Sentinel factors: jurisdiction-specific rules, factual uncertainty. These factors request contextual review; they do not delete or silently rewrite the candidate.

## Research / provenance

- [Ability-to-Repay and Qualified Mortgage Rule](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/compliance/compliance-resources/mortgage-resources/ability-repay-qualified-mortgage-rule/) — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; ATR/QM and residential underwriting.
- [Fannie Mae Selling Guide](https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/media/document/pdf/selling-guide-february-4-2026) — Fannie Mae; loan eligibility, underwriting, appraisal, delivery.
- [Freddie Mac Single-Family Seller/Servicer Guide](https://guide.freddiemac.com/) — Freddie Mac; loan eligibility, Loan Product Advisor, servicing.
