Canada: New mortgage qualification rules, 2010: Why, what, & when in effect?
The new mortgage qualification rules were introduced to cool a hot Canadian housing real estate market. The rules are a pre-emptive measure intended to avoid a bubble (and later crash) in real estate. The government wants to make sure anybody buying a house can handle higher interest rates. Those rates, currently at record lows, are expected to go up later this year and into the future. The tighter mortgage rules include: Borrowers will need to qualify against a minimum standard 5-year fixed rate mortgage, even if they'll contract their mortgage at a lower or variable rate.  Previously, the 3-year fixed rate mortgage was used as the minimum qualification standard. The amount a homeowner can borrow in a refinanced mortgage drops to 90% of the home value, down from 95% of the home value.  A home is not meant to be an ATM machine. Anybody wanting to borrow to buy an investment property – i.e. a property that won't be their principal residence – will need a 20% downpayment instead of a 5% downpayment. The new rules go into effect April 19th, 2010.  However, according to the backgrounder (see below): Exceptions would be allowed after   April 19 where they are needed to   satisfy a binding purchase and sale,   financing, or refinancing agreement   entered into before April 19, 2010. Definitive information about the new rules can be found at the Department of Finance of Canada.  Specifically, refer to: Some additional news media sources:
It is highly unlikely that this would be approved by a mortgage underwriter.   When the bank gives a loan with a security interest in a property (a lien), they are protected - if the borrower does not repay the loan, the property can be foreclosed on and sold, and the lender is made whole for the amount of the loan that was not repaid.   When two parties are listed on the deed, then each owns an UNDIVIDED 50% share in the property.  If only one party has pledged the property as surety against the loan, then in effect only 50% of the property is forecloseable.  This means that the bank is unable to recoup its loss.   For a (fictional, highly simplified) concrete example, suppose that the house is worth $100,000 and Adam and Zoe are listed on the deed, but Adam is the borrower for a $100,000 mortgage.  Adam owes $100,000 and has an asset worth $50,000 (which he has pledged as security for the loan), while Zoe owes nothing and has an asset worth $50,000 (which is entirely unencumbered).  If Adam does not pay the mortgage, the bank would only be able to foreclose on his $50,000 half of the property, leaving them exposed to great risk.   There are other legal and financial reasons, but overall I think you'll find it very difficult to locate a lender who is willing to take that kind of risk.  It's very complicated and there is absolutely no up-side.   Also - speaking from experience (from which I was protected because of the bank's underwriting rules) and echoing the advice offered by others on this site: don't bother trying.  Commingling assets without a contract (either implicit by marriage or explicit by, well a contract) is going to get you in trouble. Yes, but what qualifications are they asking for? [Here's one reasoning for why they keep bitching.](http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-bad-jobsor-no-jobshappen-to-good-workers) Essentially it sums up to the companies not wanting to pay market price for homegrown talent (essentially they set the price and expect people to sell at that price when there are plenty of buyers), the companies not wanting to spend the money training, and the companies want people who can start on the ground running instead of taking a little time to get a feel for the job.  Most of the engineers I graduated with knew that they would need more on the job training because the degrees were so general. It's almost impossible to make the degrees fit perfectly to the parameters that the companies want, so the universities provide a good engineering foundation that businesses could build upon. If the businesses were willing to spend the time training people there wouldn't be a problem. "This seems to be a very emotional thing for people and there are a lot of conflicting answers.  I agree with JoeTaxpayer in general but I think it's worth coming at it from a slightly different angle. You are in Canada and you don't get to deduct anything for your mortgage interest like in the US, so that simplifies things a bit.  The next thing to consider is that in an amortized mortgage, the later payments include increasingly more principal.  This matters because the extra payments you make earlier in the loan have much more impact on reducing your interest than those made at the end of the loan. Why does that matter?  Let's say for example, your loan was for $100K and you will end up getting $150K for the sale after all the transaction costs.  Consider two scenarios: If you do the math, you'll see that the total is the same in both scenarios.  Nominally, $50K of equity is worth the same as $50K in the bank. ""But wait!"" you protest, ""what about the interest on the loan?""  For sure, you likely won't get 2.89% on money in a bank account in this environment.  But there's a big difference between money in the bank and equity in your house: you can't withdraw part of your equity.  You either have to sell the house (which takes time) or you have to take out a loan against your equity which is likely going to be more expensive than your current loan. This is the basic reasoning behind the advice to have a certain period of time covered.  4 months isn't terrible but you could have more of a cushion.  Consider things like upcoming maintenance or improvements on the house.  Are you going to need a new roof before you move?  New driveway or landscape improvements?  Having enough cash to make a down-payment on your next home can be a huge advantage because you can make a non-contingent offer which will often be accepted at a lower value than a contingent offer. By putting this money into your home equity, you essentially make it inaccessible and there's an opportunity cost to that.  You will also earn exact 0% on that equity.  The only benefit you get is to reduce a loan which is charging you a tiny rate that you are unlikely to get again any time soon. I would take that extra cash and build more cushion.  I would also put as much money into any tax sheltered investments as you can.  You should expect to earn more than 2.89% on your long-term investments.  You really aren't in debt as far as the house goes as long as you are not underwater on the loan: the net value of that asset is positive on your balance sheet.  Yes you need to keep making payments but a big account balance covers that.  In fact if you hit on hard times and you've put all your extra cash into equity, you might ironically not being able to make your payments and lose the home. One thing I just realized is that since you are in Canada, you probably don't have a fixed-rate on your mortgage.  A variable-rate loan does make the calculation different.  If you are concerned that rates may spike significantly, I think you still want to increase your cushion but whether you want to increase long-term investments depends on your risk tolerance." "Fundamentals:  Then remember that you want to put 20% or more down in cash, to avoid PMI, and recalculate with thatmajor chunk taken out of your savings.  Many banks offer calculators on their websites that can help you run these numbers and figure out how much house a given mortgage can pay for. Remember that the old advice that you should buy the largest house you can afford, or the newer advice about ""starter homes"", are both questionable in the current market. =========================== Added:  If you're willing to settle for a rule-of-thumb first-approximation ballpark estimate: Maximum mortgage payment: Rule of 28. Your monthly mortgage payment should not exceed 28 percent of your gross monthly income (your income before taxes are taken out).  Maximum housing cost: Rule of 32. Your total housing payments (including the mortgage, homeowner’s insurance, and private mortgage insurance [PMI], association fees, and property taxes) should not exceed 32 percent of your gross monthly income. Maximum Total Debt Service: Rule of 40. Your total debt payments, including your housing payment, your auto loan or student loan payments, and minimum credit card payments should not exceed 40 percent of your gross monthly income. As I said, many banks offer web-based tools that will run these numbers for you. These are rules that the lending industy uses for a quick initial screen of an application. They do not guarantee that you in particular can afford that large a loan, just that it isn't so bad that they won't even look at it. Note that this is all in terms of mortgage paymennts, which means it's also affected by what interest rate you can get, how long a mortgage you're willing to take, and how much you can afford to pull out of your savings. Also, as noted, if you can't put 20% down from savings the bank will hit you for PMI. Standard reminder: Unless you explect to live in the same place for five years or more, buying a house is questionable financially. There is nothing wrong with renting; depending on local housing stock it may be cheaper. Houses come with ongoung costs and hassles rental -- even renting a house -- doesn't. Buy a house only when it makes sense both financially and in terms of what you actually need to make your life pleasant. Do not buy a house only because you think it's an investment; real estate can be a profitable business, but thinking of a house as simultaneously both your home and an investment is a good way to get yourself into trouble." "Several people here have highlighted the incentive/agency problems that tend to naturally arise when securitizing mortgages. However, the market for mortgage-backed securities has existed for decades, and during most of that time these agency problems were held in check. Moreover, academics knew about this problem even before the credit crisis and actually *recommended* the use of trenching in order to avoid the moral hazard problems associated with securitization (see DeMarzo 2005).  So, to give a compelling historical explanation for why the crisis happened *when* it did, you need to explain what changed in the mortgage securitization market to enable these previously unproblematic agency relationships to breakdown.  So what changed? In short, the growth of the market for CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) composed of mortgage-backed securities), and not the MBS market itself. This market grew so rapidly in the mid-2000s because the ratings agencies created an opportunity for banks to take low-rated MBS debt and give it a higher rating by merely repackaging it into a CDO. It was ratings arbitrage, through and through. Explanations that place the brunt of the blame on the GSAs (i.e. Fannie and Freddie) cannot adequately explain why the majority of mortgage-related losses during the credit crisis were concentrated in CDOs of MBSs, and not in the vanilla MBS market.  Here's what happened. Back in the day -- say, pre-early 2000s -- the agency/incentive problems that naturally arise in mortgage securitization were held in check by careful institutional investors who would rigorously assess the default risk of the higher-risk MBS tranches. They had a deep knowledge of the mortgage business. Sometimes they would even go so far as manually examining the loan documentation, the profile of the borrowers, the quality of the collateral, and so on. There were a lot of indiscriminating buyers who were happy to purchase the AAA and AA tranches, but they could afford to be indiscriminating because the banks who were securitizing MBSs knew that without selling to the discriminating buyers of higher-risk debt, they wouldn't be able to break even.   It worked a bit like a market for fine wines. I don't know much about wine, but when I walk into a shop that sells fine wines, I can be reasonably certain that there will be a reasonably strong relationship between price and the quality of the wine. Basically, I get to free-ride off the superior discrimination of the wine connoisseurs who regularly visit the shop.  Once the ratings agencies created the now infamous ""ratings arbitrage"" between the MBS and CDO markets, the market for CDOs on MBSs expanded. As this market grew, these ""discriminating"" buyers became a proportionally smaller part of the MBS market. The folks building CDOs of MBSs didn't know very much about the mortgage business itself; instead, they tended to rely on statistical default models provided by the ratings agencies that predicted the probability of mortgage default based on quantitative variables such as borrowers' credit scores, loan-to-value ratios, etc.   The problem is that these models used historical data that was collected back when the ""discriminating"" institutional investors kept the agency problems in the MBS market in check. The growth of the CDO market spurred even more mortgage securitization, which led lending standards to deteriorate because firms like Countrywide knew that the CDO buyers only cared about credit scores, LTV ratios, etc. However, undiscriminating buyers of MBS were unable to detect these changes in default risk because the models they were using to ""see"" those changes were becoming invalidated by the growth of the CDO market itself  If you want to read more about this, I'd highly recommend MacKenzie's 2011 paper in the American Journal of Sociology [see here]( http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/36082/CrisisRevised.pdf). It's a detailed historical account of the changes in valuation practices/models used within the MBS and CDO markets, and how these practices became invalidated as the CDO market grew in size.  **TL;DR: the credit ratings created a ""ratings arbitrage"" that the banks took advantage of. They are as much, if not more, at fault as the GSAs.**  For more info on the deterioration in mortgage quality in the mid-2000s, check out:   Keys, Benjamin, Tanmoy Mukherjee, Amit Seru, and Vikrant Vig. 2008. Did Securitization Lead to Lax Screening? Evidence from Subprime Loans.  Rajan, Uday, Amit Seru, and Vikrant Vig. 2008. “The Failure of Models That Predict Failure: Distance, Incentives and Defaults.” SSRN eLibrary (December). http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1296982.  Also, the citation I mentioned above:  DeMarzo, P. (2005) ""The pooling and tranching of securities: a model of informed intermediation"" Review of Economic Studies, 18(1):1-35, 2005" Banks in New Zealand tend to take a lien that is higher than the amount of the loan, so that your only option for a second mortgage is with them. ASB wanted 50% more than the value of the loan when I had my mortgage with them. Of course, with house price inflation the way it's been in NZ, the value of your house may have outstripped the lien anyway, and you can mortgage the rest of it with anyone you like. I suspect your lawyer will need to inform the other lienholder, but you don't need their permission. The behaviour described in this article was fraud and deception to work around regulations that would have kept the bubble from overinflating. If the housing bubble had stopped when they ran out of genuine loan prospects it would have been a lot less worse when it popped. There was this /r/offmychest post yesterday from a person claiming to work for a large investment bank as part of their default risk modelling team. The poster claims that the commercial and real estate lending divisions have been fudging numbers regarding default risks due to a lack of oversight and a bunch of bad commercial loans are about to become due. They further claim that a rise in interest rates could prevent many commercial properties from being able to properly ~~finance~~ refinance their loan. Here is the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/offmychest/comments/77a1vw/i_work_in_bankingfinance_risk_management_i_am/. Any one have any thoughts?            I also found this link on the Mises blog (though it is a year old) that discusses how delinquency rates on commercial and industry loans have been steadily rising since bottoming out in 2015: https://mises.org/blog/delinquency-rates-rising-new-crisis-approaching. Could be something to keep an eye on. I would love to see some more updated data on delinquency.