Canadian homeowners carried an average of $190,000 in mortgage debt in 2015

This according to a Manulife Bank of Canada survey. That’s a lot of money to owe a lender and thousands of dollars in interest to pay over the life of a mortgage.

One way to limit the amount of interest you pay is to pay off your mortgage faster than your agreed upon amortization schedule. Quickly paying down your mortgage will reduce the principal and thus reduce your interest charges. More money for you, less money for your lender.

Fortunately, there are several ways to pay your mortgage off quickly that require almost no effort. Let’s take a look at them below.

Choose Accelerated Mortgage Payments

Accelerated mortgage payments are the oldest trick in the book and

Have the recent government changes effected your home buying choices?

Call it the gap between what you have to pay and what you can afford to pay — it’s going to be considerable when you qualify for your next mortgage. Now the question is what should you do with that money?

Ottawa tightened mortgage rules in October and the one requirement that has disrupted the lending world is the stipulation that consumers qualify based on the Bank of Canada posted rate for a five-year fixed-rate mortgage.

That rate — it’s based on the most common posted rate of the big six banks for a five-year fixed rate mortgage — has been stuck at 4.64 per cent since the government announced the new measures in October 2016. Qualifying with that rate is a heavy burden and

Here's what you should – and shouldn’t – buy

by Rob Carrick -Personal Finance Columnist - The Globe and Mail

The downside of bank upselling is that customers get talked into buying junk products they don’t need.

According to the bank tellers pouring their hearts out to CBC in a series of recent reports, upselling is rampant because of pressure to meet sales targets. A customer’s best defence is to know which sales pitches are worth listening to, and which to shut down. To help promote more informed banking, the Personal Finance column presents this guide to bank products.

Buy this

• Overdraft protection: Essential for households where money is constantly flying in and out of chequing accounts to cover automatic payments, mortgages,

A mortgage is a huge undertaking

Just getting one sometimes can be hard. You have got your mortgage but did you look at the small print and read it? Here are some handy facts that you may not know.

1. How much of your payments go toward interest

Most mortgage payments are what they call blended payments, which combine repayments of the principal as well as the interest at once. When you start paying off your mortgage, a significant part of your payments are going toward the interest, not the principal. Over time, however, the principal of your loan decreases, which means that the amount you will owe in interest decreases as well. As such, the portion of your payment that goes toward the interest will decrease over time, and the amount that

January is the time for resolutions, and for many people, one of those resolutions is getting a mortgage and buying a house.

But if you’ve been keeping abreast of the recent changes in the mortgage industry or even casually following economic forecasts, then the prospect of 2017 may have you a little wary.
 

Assessing your personal situation

Only about half of Canadians think that this this is a good time to buy a home or a condominium in their community, according to a survey that was part of the latest Annual State of the Residential Mortgage Market in Canada.
 
“The fall 2016 responses to this question have been contrasted with consumer opinions on how the new mortgage insurance rules would affect their ability to buy a home or condominium.

The head of Canada's federal housing agency says regulators should explore the possibility of raising the minimum down payment required on a home as a way of easing affordability and reducing risk to the financial system.

The head of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) has opened the door to the possibility of increasing the minimum down payment needed to buy a house, though a change is not currently on the table. Evan Siddall, president and CEO of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., says that although politicians are tempted to help first-time buyers, low down payments fuel demand and lead to higher housing costs. Siddall says that ends up hurting the first-time buyers that the government wanted to help.

Last year, Ottawa raised the minimum down

The home-buying landscape – especially when it comes to mortgage qualification and rates – seems to be changing constantly these days.

Mortgage expert Atrina Kouroshnia makes sense of it all

Until (very) recently, Canadians were getting the short end of the stick – at least when it came to income qualifying, compared with foreign buyers. Unlike Canadians, those from outside of Canada could essentially just plunk down 35 per cent on a property in order to buy it; this without some lenders doing serious due diligence on whether they were good for the remaining capital. This had many Canadians furious about the tight guidelines and standards that they were compelled to meet, but that foreign buyers were not. Things changed last month.

You know

Need to sell a house underwater?  If you don’t know what this means then let me enlighten you. It means the house is not worth what you need to sell it for.

Maybe your job has just relocated you, a family member is sick, the neighborhood is declining. Whatever the reason is, you need to move, and you need to sell your house fast. You call up a realtor and they tell you all the things that you need to do to get it sold, such as cleaning up, painting the house and even what he believes it will sell for. But we have 1 problem…… The house is worth less than you paid for it. This does not mean that you made a mistake in buying the home, lots of other factors can combine to make this situation occur. In BC for example if you paid market value for a home and