Interest rates, where to start! This is often the center of a borrowers focus and in today's lending environment one of the hardest elements to navigate. The interest rate that you get on a mortgage today is dependent on so many factors, your credit score, the amount of equity you have in the home, whether it is default insured (that's a whole post on it's own!), and the intended use of the home. In this blog piece I am going to focus on defining the various types of rate tha

Next up in our Mortgage Basics series is term. The term is the period of time in which you are committing to an interest rate and all of the other conditions accompanying the mortgage. The most commonly taken term in Canada is a five year fixed, but there are plenty of other term lengths that you can sign on for. Most lenders have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10 year terms for fixed rate mortgages. On the variable side of things lenders tend to only offer either a 3 (very limited le

In this blog series we're going to take it back to basics and talk about what role each element of a mortgage plays. Amortization can be a big daunting word, but it's actually a pretty simple concept. It is a derivative of the noun 'amortize' which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as: "Gradually write off the initial cost of (an asset) over a period" Essentially it is how long it will take to pay your mortgage off to a zero balance. The amortization period of a mortgage