ANATOMYof a mortgage
Most people sign the largest contract of their life without ever seeing inside it. Scroll, and we’ll take one apart together — payment by payment, rate by rate — using one illustrative Vancouver-sized example.
Open it upA $600,000 mortgage at 4.39%, 25-year amortization — $3,284 a month, every month. The payment never changes. What’s inside it changes every single month.
The crossover — from here on, more of every payment builds your house than pays for the money.
Rates are weather.
A mortgage plan is climate.
A quarter-century of the Bank of Canada’s policy rate: two panics, one long calm, one steep climb, and a settling. Nobody — truly nobody — called every turn. That is exactly why we structure terms around your life instead of a forecast.
Bank of Canada overnight policy rate, 2000–2025, approximate year-end values, for illustration only. Mortgage contract rates sit above this line and move on their own logic.
You qualify at more
than you pay.
Canada’s stress test (B-20) asks a simple question: if rates rose two points tomorrow, could you still carry the house? It can feel like a hurdle. It is actually a seatbelt — and knowing exactly how lenders apply it is how we shape a file that passes.
What you pay
Your contract rate — the real monthly carrying cost of the example above.
What you prove
Contract rate plus two points — the payment a lender must believe you could make before saying yes.
with you.
Every payment pours a little more gold into the frame. Slowly at first — then faster every year, as interest’s share shrinks. This is just the mortgage paydown: any growth in the home’s value stacks on top.
Bring us the life.
We’ll build the mortgage around it.
The numbers above are one example. Yours will be different — and the difference is the whole job. A first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.