Tagmortgage advice

Posted November 2, 2024 Mortgage News

TIME TO ELIMINATE AIRBNBS?.. (No, I don’t think so)

TIME TO GO AFTER AIRBNBS?.. (No, I don’t think so)

Canada wants to eliminate all Short Term Rentals (STR). And they are going to punish anyone that has rented out their properties for short term stays.

The federal gov’t has already changed tax laws that disallow expensing interest costs on STRs in major urban centers. Effectively making it more costly to own a short term rental property.

Changes to short-term rental rules – link to article

And here’s another tax. Have you seen this?

Posted December 10, 2021 Mortgage News

Surprise, Surprise: No Rate Hike From Bank of Canada

For months we’ve been warned by “experts” that rates are sure to shoot up. That the Bank of Canada will change their tune based on the state of the economy. That by year’s end, we’ll be well on our way to pre-pandemic rates that will make anyone with a variable rate mortgage regret ever buying a home.

It’s December. None of that has happened.

Posted October 5, 2021 Consumer Debt

Despite Uncertainty, Canadians Are Keeping Up With Mortgage Payments

You might have heard some sensationalist news stories over the past year about Canadian homeowners over-borrowing. With the employment rate so low, and mortgage debt so high, how could Canadians possibly keep up with their payments? Headlines spewed dire warnings that once payment deferrals expired, borrowers would default in droves.

Except that isn’t what happened at all.

Posted June 8, 20211 Comment Mortgage News

How Financing a Furnace Can Affect Your Mortgage

“Save up to $3,000 on heating and cooling”

“No monthly payments for 3 months”

“No interest for 6 months”

Sound familiar? You’ve probably seen tons of offers like these on flyers and emails from your utility company. It sounds great on the surface. You can save some money, lock in low monthly payments, and avoid spending thousands of dollars at once on a furnace or air conditioner.

If it all sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is.

Posted July 3, 20201 Comment Mortgage News

Navigate through these uncharted waters in 2020

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is canadamortgagenews-navigate-uncharted-waters.png

In 2009 and 2010, for the first time ever we saw mortgage rates under 2.00%. That’s right, if you were in a variable rate mortgage, you had a rate under 2.00%. We were coming off the catastrophic US sub-prime mortgage crisis. The financial US scam that cost the world trillions of dollars in lost pensions and investments. Tens of thousands of people lost everything they had. It was horrible. While we, in Canada, were largely untouched. We weren’t smarter, we were just lucky not to be exposed to the subprime mortgages to the extent the rest of the world was. As they say, Canada is five years behind the US, and in this case, we got lucky.

That said, let’s get back to mortgage rates and fast forward to 2020.