James Leitch

Good Morning, It's been a long while since a post but this is a good place to start. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions has amended the guidelines to all non-insured mortgages (ie 20% or more down payment). This will take effect January 1st 2018. Now all mortgages will be required to qualify at a higher interest rate than the contract rate that you are given by the lender. This might seem a little confusing but essentially the mortgage amount ...anyone can now qualify for has been reduced substantially. This will affect people both buying and refinancing. So I recommend that if you have any plans to buy or refinance in the near future get in touch with myself or your mortgage contact to see if your plans will be negatively affected by these changes on January 1st 2018. Take a look at this link for the full story. http://www.jamesleitchmortgages.ca//rule-changes-osfi-fin/

Please read this and pass it along, it could be a significant issue for you or someone you know in the short and/or long term. In full disclosure I will start by saying that this is somewhat self-serving since it appears the Mortgage Broker sector of the industry will be more affected than others, but I do feel that the ripples of this will reach Canadians as a whole in the short/long term. On October 3rd the finance minister released new policies to attempt to slow d...Continue reading

Hello all, We had a good meeting/seminar with Genworth Canada last week and one of the topics was about their Homeownership Assistance Program. For those unfamiliar, Genworth is one of the 3 default insurers that provide mortgage default insurance here in Canada. The others being CMHC (as it's most commonly known) and Canada Guaranty. The other two offer similar programs as well and I've put links to all three below.... The Homeownership Assistance Program is designed to help homeowners who've got a Genworth insured mortgage to get help with keeping their home when they fall on hard times. If I remember correctly the average cost for Genworth to take over a home that's in arrears and sell it is in the neighbourhood of $75K when you factors in real estate costs and other expenses associated with selling a house. So taking certain steps to help people keep their homes can be beneficial for them as well as the home owners and the lenders. They do so in several ways, including covering payments for 6 months and more details can be reviewed in the link below. So if you know someone that's going through some tough life events, such as illness, job loss or divorce, there might be a way to help weather the storm and not lose their home in the process. http://genworth.ca/en/homeowner-assistance.aspx http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/co_005.cfm http://www.canadaguaranty.ca//homeownership-solutions-pro/

Happy New Years, I haven't had a chance to see The Big Short yet but it's on my list. This article helps to give some more insight into what happened in he US regarding the recession in 2008. Another good one to watch is Inside Job, made in 2010 narrated by Matt Damon, it helps to give an even more view at the shaky house of cards that the mortgage industry south of the border was built on. And there's a CBC doc called Meltdown that adds even more info, I'm pretty sur...e you can find it on youtube. I get asked a lot if something like that can happen here and while it's impossible to prevent every possible problem, our system has very stringent safe guards and they're largely responsible for us being the only G7 country that didn't bail out any banks. Give this a read and check out those Documentaries if you have some time. Have a great day, http://www.mortgagebrokernews.ca//guest-column-the-big-sho

A good article highlighting the need to fully understand the features of your mortgage. I will note a couple things: First, the lenders the author uses as examples are from the "Big 6" and as I've mentioned before the IRD calculation they use is much different from what a smaller monoline lenders will use. Despite using the same name for the calculation. ... And in relation to that, when talking with your mortgage professional, Bank based or Broker based, make sure they can fully explain what variables are being used to make the IRD calculation, since that will mean a dramatic difference in the true cost of your penalty. As most who know me will attest to, I'm a big variable rate fan, for the fact that besides historically saving interest over the fixed, it also (with a few exceptions, so be careful) always has a max of 3 months interest as a penalty. So the key to this is being fully informed not only on IRD vs TMI but also the variables used to calculate the IRD. Any questions on this, let me know and have a great day, http://www.msn.com//for-mortgage-breakers-not-/ar-AAeRzyP