Behind the Mortgage: Every Document and Step Your Lender Actually Needs to Approve You
In this special admin edition of the Wisdom Lifestyle Money Show, host Kristen Dillingham sits down with LendCity Mortgages admins Kayla Miller and Jillian Barnes to demystify the mortgage application process. Drawing from their backgrounds in healthcare and medical care before j…
In this special admin edition of the Wisdom Lifestyle Money Show, host Kristen Dillingham sits down with LendCity Mortgages admins Kayla Miller and Jillian Barnes to demystify the mortgage application process. Drawing from their backgrounds in healthcare and medical care before joining the team in 2018, the trio shares how they've learned the ins and outs of mortgages from scratch under Scott Dillingham's guidance. They emphasize that getting a mortgage is simpler than expected for many, but success hinges on proper documentation, budgeting wisely, and avoiding impulse buys like expensive cars that depreciate and impact financing power. The discussion highlights transferable life skills, like prioritizing homeownership over short-term luxuries, and provides practical advice for first-time buyers and investors alike.
Diving into the LendCity process, they outline steps from initial lead intake to pre-approval, including filling out applications, submitting income docs, and cross-referencing details for accuracy. Key tips include ensuring job letters are on company letterhead, signed by HR, non-editable (PDF preferred), and dated within 30-60 days, as lenders like banks require this to verify employment and prevent fraud—policies tightened post-COVID. Pay stubs must be clear, with matching year-to-date earnings, and explanations for discrepancies like unpaid leave. For identification, two pieces of government-issued ID (front and back) are needed, such as driver's licenses, passports, or even hunting/gun licenses, but health cards are prohibited. The episode stresses transparency to avoid surprises, noting that blurry or incomplete docs lead to delays.
For investors with rental portfolios, they cover needing recent leases, tenant acknowledgments for month-to-month setups, T1s for rental income verification, mortgage statements, and city-issued property tax bills (not just escrow combos). Assets like savings, vehicles, or household goods are crucial for high-net-worth programs, closing costs, or creative strategies to boost purchasing power, such as paying off debts. On appraisals for refinances, cleaning the home, mowing the lawn, and pointing out upgrades like new floors, countertops, or windows can help maximize value. As of November 2025, LendCity continues to focus on investor-friendly financing, with no major policy shifts noted in Canadian mortgage regulations per recent checks. This episode equips listeners with actionable insights to navigate mortgages confidently, blending personal stories with updated best practices.
Key Takeaways
- Backgrounds and Learning Curve: Kristen, Kayla, and Jillian transitioned from healthcare with no prior experience, learning mortgage basics from Scott Dillingham since 2018, highlighting that the process is simpler than assumed but depends on individual situations.
- Budgeting for Homeownership: Prioritize saving over luxury purchases like cars, which depreciate and increase debt ratios, impacting mortgage approval—focus on long-term wealth through homes.
- Job Letter Requirements: Must be on company letterhead, signed by a superior or HR, non-editable (PDF), and dated within 30-60 days; lenders verify to confirm employment and prevent fraud.
- Pay Stub Essentials: Clear images with name, employer, matching year-to-date earnings; explain discrepancies like unpaid leave to avoid issues, as post-COVID policies demand thorough checks.
- Identification Rules: Two pieces of government-issued ID (front/back), e.g., driver's license, passport, birth certificate, or hunting/gun licenses; health cards are not accepted, and work/school IDs may not qualify.
- Rental Property Docs: Recent leases or tenant acknowledgments, T1s for income, mortgage statements, and city tax bills; disclose property management fees upfront to ensure accurate pre-approvals.
- Assets in Applications: List savings, vehicles, and goods for fallback options, closing costs, or strategies like debt payoffs to increase purchasing power; enables high-net-worth programs for low-income scenarios like retirees.
- Appraisal Preparation Tips: Clean and tidy the home, mow the lawn, hide clutter; highlight upgrades (e.g., new windows, granite counters) to appraisers for better valuation in refinances.
Links to Show References
- LendCity Mortgages (for Mortgage Applications): lendcity.ca
- Contact LendCity: Phone - (519) 960-0370; Email - team@lendcity.ca; Office - 4769 Wyandotte St E, Windsor, ON N8Y 1H8
- Wisdom Lifestyle Money Show Podcast: podcast.lendcity.ca
- (00:07) - Introduction to Mortgage Processes
- (02:44) - The Application Process
- (07:12) - Required Documentation
- (08:52) - Managing Rental Properties
- (11:38) - Importance of Listing Assets
- (13:57) - Preparing for Appraisal
- (15:22) - Closing Remarks and Future Episodes
Transcript
Introduction
Welcome to the Wisdom Lifestyle Money Show. I'm your host, Scott Dillingham. The show is designed to help Canadians invest better in Canada and the United States. We are the North America-based mortgage financing lender and provide education to both countries.
Discover how you can become a better investor and access the financing you need. Hey guys, I'm Kristen. This is the admin edition of the Wisdom Lifestyle and Money Podcast. And so I'm Kristen Dillingham, sister of Scott Dillingham.
And we also have... Oh, my name is Kayla.
And I'm Jillian. And we're here today to talk about the mortgage processes and proper documents, what to expect, and a little bit about ourselves before we started working in mortgages. Jillian, to get things started, what have you learned since you started working in mortgages? I, when I first started, I knew nothing about mortgages.
The Core Idea
So I pretty much started from zero and learned from both you and Kayla and Kristen. I've learned that it's much simpler to get a mortgage than I originally thought, but that's also dependent on your situation as well.
What about you, Kayla? I guess to piggyback off that, you say it's simple, and I know it does depend on the scenarios. However, it also depends on proper documentation, which we will get to. But before this, I was in medical care, and I just learning everything.
I started here, and now I know the process somewhat. I have to go through it myself. But yeah, just learning from Kristen. And I had no experience in this field.
I, too, was in healthcare. I started here with Scott when he opened up in 2018, and basically I learned from Scott. By the way, if we say basically a lot, it's our go-to word. So, like you guys, no experience, but one big thing is proper financing.
Deep Dive
Like, instead of buying a car, you could buy a car that maybe is not so expensive, and then save that money. That's something I had never done. But now working in mortgages, I learned, still learning, but I learned how to budget properly, because getting into a home is greater than buying a fancy car every couple years. And to piggyback off the car, everyone always says once you drive the car off the lot, it depreciates in value.
But I wish someone told me really why, and the other factors, too, like a larger car payment really impacts your way of getting financing. So I wish that part was also taught. But that's what we're here to bring a few points to you guys. So let's talk about the process of applying with Lens City Mortgages.
Jillian, say a new lead comes in. What do you do? The first thing we do is the lead comes in from the agent. Usually a client will contact the agent, and then the one of the mortgage agents will send us an onboarding, which has the contact information for all of the clients' information, what kind of what they want to do, if they're a first-time homebuyer, if they're an investor.
From there, we send out the application for them to fill out, and then we ask them for proper documentation, which I'm sure we'll touch on the list. It's income docs, just so we can get a better picture of where your situation is at. We'll cross-reference that with the application that's completed, and then this is just a gist. Once that's done, the agent will review and then give the client a best idea of where they're at with their mortgage.
Practical Steps
Now, say I'm applying and I submit a job letter that's handwritten. Is that acceptable?
No. Why, though?
It's from my boss. Who cares?
There's a few factors. One, we could touch on if it's handwritten, did the boss sign it? If they didn't sign it, I know a lot of lenders do require a superior or HR to sign off on the letter so then we can call and confirm your employment that way as long or as well as the lenders do. What else do we require on the job letter?
Key Takeaways
Title head. Yeah, letter head. We want the letter head or title head or symbol of the company on the document to make it more official.
Non-editable. Is that a word?
Yeah. If we get a Word document that's editable, we can save it as a PDF. However, that means at some point we could have altered the document and typically the lenders will decline it right away. And it kind of looks like you wrote it yourself or something.
If someone sends you a Word doc, it's like, who typed this up? The main thing too with submitting documentation that I think everybody needs to know is even though you don't know what the lender's requiring, look at it from that standpoint where the lender doesn't know that's your job. The lender doesn't know those are your bank statements unless your name is on it. They're coming from a very blind perspective of your file.
Resources
So that's one thing when you're getting this information they want, are you hourly or salary? Do you have a minimum amount of hours? They want to see all this to confirm and I think with COVID it really changed all the lenders' policies on what they do want to see on it and that's why you see some generations say this is so much to ask for but the policies have changed so much that they all have to assume it's like people are committing fraud, not saying everyone is but they have to assume that until they can check out all of your documentation.
And one catch too, if it's over 30 days the lenders typically will ask for an updated job letter, some will let it go 60 days but if we are asking you for updated documents and you're thinking I literally just sent them that it's probably because they're over 30 days old and it's not us asking it's the lender that's asking. Yeah, I think that's a big topic.
Same with pay stubs. Yeah, a lot of clients think that we're the ones asking when it's actually the lender, the bank, that's giving you the money that needs the documentation.
Same with pay stubs. When we're looking at a pay stub we want to see that it has your name on it, it has the employer's name somewhere on it, that the year to date matches up. So if your job letter says you work 80 hours bi-weekly at whatever wage, we will calculate that based on how many pay periods and if the year to date is low, say it's $4,000 lower than it should be, we will ask, you know, your pay stubs are lower, was there a reason?
Introduction
Nine times out of ten, people will say, oh yeah, I just took some unpaid time off, I went on an extended vacation, as long as we have an explanation, it's usually okay. But if you're sending us images of pay stubs that are blurry, they're cut off, we will have to come back and ask for better images. So just bear with us on that because the lenders have policies and they need to be able to read the entire document.
Yeah. Thank you.
You're welcome. So the next thing I wanted to touch on was identification. So we need two pieces of ID, the front and backside. For our compliance reasons, we want to verify it's you, but one catch is we cannot accept health cards and I think it's because we are not a medical facility, but we can accept any other types of government ID and a couple of unique ones we've gotten.
I received, I believe it was like a hunting license or in a gun license and that was acceptable. I think it's government issues, so that makes sense. But we can accept school IDs or what's one form of ID you guys have received that we can't accept?
The Core Idea
That's a good question. Like we have work IDs, but we can accept those. Yeah, I've gotten a work ID, like an employment card before and it's, you can't use that. Health cards, we delete right away.
We're not even supposed to have them in our records. I don't know. I've received marriage license before, but I think we can use that.
I'm not. For ID?
Yeah. I'd have to look into that one. Yeah, I've received a marriage license before. But typically we get SIN cards front and back, even though the SIN card, the new ones, I don't believe have anything on the back.
Deep Dive
We still need it. A driver's license front and back, birth certificates.
Passport. Yeah, passport. We don't really need the back of the passport.
It's literally. Just like the cover, like the open, yeah. Yeah, so basically as long as we have front and back, it's clear.
It's perfect. Now, say you're applying with us and you have a large portfolio already. You have multiple properties that are rental properties. What types of documents would we need for that?
Practical Steps
We usually ask for recent leases. I know that's difficult if there's like month-to-month leases, but that's from, I don't know, 2017. But in that case, we would ask for a tenant acknowledgement form to be signed.
We also require the T1s. if you've owned it for more than one or two years just so we can see the rental income that you record on your T1s. And then, along with that, we'll need all the property documents. So we have to make sure that when you fill out the application, everything is, sorry, we have to make sure that everything is filled out accurately.
So that's the mortgage statements, property tax bill. I know there's a few scenarios where clients' mortgage also has the property tax amount combined with it, but what they want to see is the city version of the tax bill to ensure that taxes are up to date. We can go more in depth on that and explain that a bit later. And then, like Jillian said, those lease agreements and the tenant acknowledgement, I know it can be a little bit of a pain in the butt when you have a big portfolio.
This is to ensure that when Scott or your agent runs your numbers, everything is ran correct because if we don't have those documents, we can't assume because we don't want that on us, but then we also don't want to tell you guys you're pre-approved for X amount, but then when you provide your documents, that's not there to back it up and we don't want that to hurt the clients. Now, some of the mortgages will report on the Bureau and if the home is in Windsor, we do have access to the City of Windsor tax assessment page.
Key Takeaways
However, it doesn't show if you owe any back taxes, so the lenders typically won't accept that. But say you have rentals, there would be lenders or private, that's not going to report on the Bureau. So that's why we ask for those documents just to ensure that we have the proper numbers. And if you have multiple rentals, another question we'll ask is if you have a property management company because if you do, we have to add that in under like management fees.
So say the one unit or the one property has two doors on it, your management fee may be $200 a month, let's say. So we have to add that in. If we find that out after you're approved for a mortgage and the lender redoes the numbers adding that new management fee, that could harm your file. So the more you can disclose up front, it is a lot of work, but it'll protect you in the long run because we'll have everything accurate and up to date.
So the next topic I have here is why do we need assets listed on the application? We need assets. The lenders want to see is there anything you can fall back on worst case scenario? Is there anything that we can do to help?
Maybe there's a debt that you can pay off and that'll bump up your purchasing power. So assets really do come in very handy. It could be do you own vehicles? Do you have like household goods, I guess?
Resources
There was a scenario where I actually had someone sell off their truck to help their purchasing power. So they just want to see that are there any additional savings? So when Scott or the agent runs the numbers, they can grab, well not grab, but they can say if we shift this asset to here to help pay some of this off, it bumps it up X amount.
Yep. I usually tell the clients like give us the best list of assets you have specifically for closing costs so the lender knows you have closing costs. I also tell them that it gives Scott or the agent some creative ideas in case your ratios are out of line or anything like that. They can be like, like you said, pay off, you have enough money to pay off this debt, we can do that or you put more down payment, I know that you have extra savings, some options.
And another reason Scott likes to see the assets listed because there's high net worth programs. Now, I don't know all the details of those, but if your income is very low, say you're retired and you're just receiving pension or something like that, but you have millions of dollars saved up that is going to pay you back over time, there's programs for that. So that's like another reason and like Jillian was saying for the closing costs, sometimes the lawyer fees or say you're buying a new house, the land transfer tax, those are some unforeseen costs.
So if we know that you have a good chunk saved up in savings, like we know that you'll have money on closing and it's not going to be a surprise that, oh, you owe an extra six grand for land transfer, but if you don't have any saved, it's good to have a backup plan. So one other topic I want to touch on is say we're doing a refinance of your home and we have to order an appraisal because it's required by the lender before they'll fund the mortgage.
Introduction
A couple of things to keep in mind. When an appraiser goes in, they're going to take photos of the condition of your home. So I would recommend cleaning your house. If you have pets and the pets are in the photos, that's, we like that because sometimes we get to see a copy of the report.
Sometimes we don't though. It goes directly to the lender. But keeping your house as clean as possible and if the appraiser comes in and they're like, we don't know if we can get you the value that you're looking for, you can say, you know what, we just redid this room. This has brand new hardwood flooring.
It costs us this much. We have this brand new countertop. It's not, what's that, wood material that I'm thinking of? Just the regular countertops of the plywood?
Yeah, or the press board wood. But if you have granite countertops versus that's going to help boost the value too. If you have little things like that will help boost the value that you can point out to the appraiser when they're, like, or if you just got brand new windows. Sometimes you can't tell but you can say, hey, look, I just put $20,000 worth of brand new windows and doors in my home.
The Core Idea
So those are little things to keep in mind that might help boost the value of your home. I would definitely say the one, yeah, what you touched on, the one thing you can do is if you know the appraisal's happening, make sure your house is clean and tidy. You don't have to go scrubbing floors like crazy. Just everything that's out, I would just put in a bin and kind of cover it.
No one knows. Exactly. They're not going to go in all your cupboards or anything.
So just, yeah. Yeah, find a closet.
Put everything in there. Actually, no, they do take photos of garages too sometimes. Or just cut the grass too.
Deep Dive
Oh, yeah. It's simple. I know it's a stressful time. A lot of people are selling and buying, so I know you're busy, but that little might get you to that value that you do need to get to.
Not guaranteeing anything, but I'm saying it is beneficial. All right, so I just want to thank you guys for just sitting down and listening to us ramble. Although we don't have a lot of great investment advice, we do have some pretty good mortgage experience that we want to continue to share with you guys.
So with that, Kayla, take us away. Or take it away. All right, yeah, so that's it for today. We're going to try and put out more episodes, but if you do have any questions about anything we discussed, don't hesitate to reach out, call, email, stop by within office hours.
Yeah, and we are here to help out and hopefully just bring a different perspective to your whole process to point out these little tips and tricks. Thank you so much for tuning into the show today. If you found value, please follow the show and rate it five stars. It would mean the world to me.
Practical Steps
And lastly, all the resources that we spoke about are at the bottom of the show notes. Looking forward to seeing you on the next episode.
