You might think you would be rewarded for toiling away to save a down payment of 20% or greater. Well, forget it. Your only prize for all that self-sacrifice is paying a higher interest rate than people who didn’t bother. Once upon a time we had high ratio vs conventional mortgages, now it’s changed to; […]

I remember the first time I learned about how compound interest can work for you. I was introduced by a friend to someone in the financial services industry and he explained a simple technique to easily calculate how compound interest can work for you – the Rule of 72. I was so excited and started […]

Canada’s economy continue to generate job growth in March, extending an employment rally that is the strongest in years, but with increasingly sluggish wage increases. Canadian employment grew by 19,400 in March–exceeding economists’ expectation for the fourth consecutive month–while the unemployment rate increased 0.1 percentage points to 6.7% as more people searched for work. This […]

The mortgage process can seem huge and overwhelming. It can be an emotional process because a mortgage is the loan you are taking to buy a home for yourself and your family which makes it infinitely more than just a loan. Or it may represent the loan you are taking to refinance your home to […]

We are all familiar with the banks and local credit unions, but what are monoline lenders and why are they in the market? Mono, meaning alone, single or one, these lenders simply provide a single yet refined service: to fulfill mortgage financing as requested. Banks and credit unions, on the other hand, offer an array […]

A sincere thank you to our regulators, Ministers, MP’s, etc. for your concern about my personal debt figures. And thanks for channelling this concern into recent deep and drastic cuts to my personal (home financing) purchasing power. Although certainly chopping Canadian families’ ability to buy a home in today’s rising market by a whopping 20% […]

The human brain struggles with distinguishing between a real or imagined threat. Is it a snake? Or just a shoelace? One may kill us quick, and so we react fast and think it through later… or maybe never. Is the often cited, rarely critiqued, ‘debt-to-income’ ratio a snake or a shoelace? A killer lying in […]

Our Government has concerns about their role with CMHC — essentially a mortgage insurance company — a role in which taxpayers are technically liable for their clients’ actions and behaviour (despite current CMHC premium reserves on hand to withstand up to a 40% market devaluation). These concerns were apparently part of justification used regarding recent […]

During a recent trip to our nation’s Capital with folks from Dominion Lending Centres and other mortgage groups, an Ottawa insider made an interesting comment: “We don’t care about consumer debt, because we don’t guarantee it.” This comment was made in an effort to justify recent increased restrictions placed on borrowers taking out insured mortgages […]

There have been a lot of changes in the mortgage market over the past few months so many Canadian’s plans regarding homeownership may have shifted quite a bit from last year. First, new qualification rules came to pass in October where even though actual contract rates are sitting at about 2.79% all Canadians have to […]