Hugo Dos Reis – VINE Group Obtaining a regular mortgage in 2019 can be quite a challenge with the stress test rules, lender policy changes, et cetera. Obtaining a mortgage for a rental property can be even more challenging with all the very conservative lending criteria lenders use to assess affordability. There are plenty of

Hugo Dos Reis – VINE Group With the warmer spring weather comes a much more active real estate market and we’ve seen a significant increase in consumer confidence for 2019 than we did this time last year. We’ve also recognized that there still seems to be a large disconnect between clients financing expectations on what

Hugo Dos Reis Tax season is just around the corner. If you haven’t already started preparing, you’ll want to ensure you’re ready as the process can be very document heavy. The deadlines are April 30th 2019 for personal returns and June 15th 2019 for self-employed submissions. With mortgage rules consistently changing, having both a strong

Hugo Dos Reis If you’re self-employed like us, you’ve likely experienced how difficult it can be to obtain financing from a lender. With 15% of the Canadian population being self-employed, the reality is that most of these individuals show much less income on their tax return than they actually earn. While this allows significant tax

Hugo Dos Reis Canadian bond yields have dropped aggressively since Nov 2018 with the benchmark 5 year yield at 1.90 for the first week of January 2019, down from the 2.46% range for the last quarter of 2018. Current bond yields are now lower than they’ve been for ALL of 2018, but mortgage rates are

Hugo Dos Reis 2018 has been a historic year for mortgage rule changes and policy tightening. We kicked off the year with the “Stress Test”, impacting the way Canadians qualify for mortgages by increasing the criteria lenders use for mortgage underwriting. This change alone reduced overall borrowing capacity by an average 30%. Meaning, that borrowers