Thanks for tuning in today. Today's show, I'm gonna reveal to you how to save the most amount of money when you're qualifying for your mortgage. Most clients think, let's just get the lowest rate. That's how to save the most on your mortgage, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Rate is only maybe one tenth of how you can save on your mortgage.
Scott Dillingham:Now I've been lending for more than ten years now, and a lot of the things I'm gonna share with you today, most brokers and bankers, they don't even know that these things are an option. So I'm gonna share them with you to show you how you can help them save. Now, what inspired this show was the fact that I actually made a mini book about this. So you can pick up the book in our office free of charge. We're at 4769 Wyandotte Street East in Windsor.
Scott Dillingham:Or if you wanna download the electronic version, just go to our website, which is Lendcity. So that's lendcity.cng. And then when you're there, click the ebooks tab, and then you can you'll have the download link there to do it. But I'm gonna dive into some of the topics. If I can cover them all in this episode, I will.
Scott Dillingham:But I'll dive into as many as I can, and then we'll go from there. One of the first ways that we're gonna talk about to save you lots of money on your mortgage is porting your CMHC fees. So this is a very uncommon practice, but it can result in huge savings for you. So when you port your home, most people know you bring your mortgage with you and you get the new home, but your CMHC fees are portable too. So for an example, let's say you bought the home for $2.50 and then you're purchasing a new home for 500 and you're porting.
Scott Dillingham:So CMHC will give you a credit for the first 250,000 of your home, and then they'll do what's called a top up of the balance. So you're not paying the full CMHC fee, this tip alone can result in a huge savings for you. Okay? So make sure you ask your lender if they're porting your CMHC fee. And if they tell you no, ask them why, because you could be saving tons just by that tip alone.
Scott Dillingham:Another tip is lowering your fees at closing time. So there's two ways a lender can register your mortgage. They can do a full charge, which means the lender registers 100% of the purchase price against the title of your home, or there's a partial charge where the lender only registers the amount that you're borrowing from home. We encourage you to ask your lender and it doesn't matter the lender that you work with, most of them will be able to change this for you. So you just tell them you only want them to register the amount that you're borrowing, not the full amount.
Scott Dillingham:So by doing that, I'll give you a perfect example. We had a client, he bought a home for $2,000,000 The lender wanted to charge him a $3,000 title insurance fee because we're doing it as a like, we're using the lender's in house lawyer, so the title insurance fee was going to be $3,000. And I said to the lender, I'm like, no. Don't do that. Register the lending amount, which was only for 1,000,000.
Scott Dillingham:Just by doing that, the title insurance fee went from $3,000 to $700. So they saved $2,300 just by us lowering it to a partial charge. Obviously, the purchase price of your home will have a a major impact on the amount of the fees. So the smaller the house, the smaller the fees. But regardless, just by having them register a partial charge will save you money.
Scott Dillingham:The other benefit to you is down the road, if you're looking to get additional financing, you'll be able to. Whereas if the lender registers the full charge of your property, there's no equity that you'd be able to access through another lender. So this gives you more flexibility. Okay, so the third strategy that we discussed in this guide is mortgage penalties. So there's a very drastic difference in the way that mortgage penalties are calculated.
Scott Dillingham:So if you get a variable rate mortgage, most of the lenders are gonna just charge you a simple three months interest penalty. Pretty standard. But if you get it fixed, there's a couple of ways the lenders will calculate this. So with the fixed, they can calculate it either using the posted rate. So the posted rate is the mortgage rate without any type of discounts.
Scott Dillingham:It's like the regular priced rate, and then there's a discounted rate. So when you have a lender like most major banks, they calculate this on the posted rate, and when you get your penalty, it can be quite high, where we have access to multiple lenders and they use the discounted rate. So the rate that you're being given or something very similar to when they calculate the penalties. So just by going from lender A to lender B, you can save nearly half of your mortgage penalty just based on how they calculate. Now, a lot of people buy their homes and they think I'm never gonna need these prepayment options, or I'm not worried about my mortgage penalty because I'm gonna stay here forever.
Scott Dillingham:But in all reality, everybody, not everybody, but the average amount of time that someone keeps their mortgage is for three years. Then they're either selling, they're moving, they're refinancing, like they're doing something with their mortgage. It's triggering penalties for tons of people. So just by picking the correct lender right off the bat, it will save you tons on your penalties. Now the fourth tip or strategy is can you refinance your home fee free?
Scott Dillingham:So many lenders charge you a mortgage penalty when you refinance your home. And again, as I mentioned in the previous step, about three years is the average time that somebody keeps their mortgage for. Now there are lenders out there that allow you to refinance your mortgage without penalty, and it's called a refinance blend. So how they do that is say you got a five year fixed and then one year into your term, you decide that you wanna refinance it. So what they'll do is they'll keep the remaining term that you had left, which would be four years in this scenario, and they'll do the refinance based on the four year fixed rate at that time.
Scott Dillingham:And so the five year fixed money that you had at that point in time stays the same, then they add on what you're asking to refinance, they add that on at the four year fixed rate, and they blend everything all together for one nice payment for you, but there's no mortgage penalty in those scenarios. So that's something else that you should ask when you're qualifying for a mortgage. Ask your lender if you can refinance it later without penalty. If they say no, I would probably switch or again speak to someone like LensCity, and we'll go over the lenders that will allow it and will not allow it. So just by knowing these things proactively can save you tons of money down the road.
Scott Dillingham:So another strategy is the fixed versus variable debate. So I have a picture in in our book, and it shows you the fixed rates and the variable rates over the past twenty five years. Now if you averaged it out, the fixed rates from the chart, it looks about 5.75 was the average fixed rate over the past twenty five years. Now keep in mind that this goes back as far as January 1995 when rates were at 10%. So you have to consider that where now obviously it's much lower.
Scott Dillingham:It's like low twos, even some lenders on the five year fixed are below 2%. But keep that in mind, that's the average, but the five year variable rates, the average is about 5%, actually a little less than that, it's probably around 4.75% is the average for the variable over the last twenty five years. Now a lot of customers that we have, they're fearful that if they get the variable rates, of their payments and that can increase, which it can, but the variable rate, they tie it to the economy and they try not to change the variable too much because car loans, credit cards, there's a bunch of things that are tied to variable. They only raise it when they raise the variable, it's only by decimal two five of a percent at a time, and then they analyze the market, see how it's affecting things, and if it's affected things greater than they anticipated, they'll keep the variable rate stable, and then they'll check the market a little bit later and see what rates are doing then. So overall, the variable has been a lot cheaper than the fixed, and it has lower penalties to get out of.
Scott Dillingham:And another cool thing is if the economy is doing exceptionally well, that's when the variable rates start to go up. So if you do get a variable rate when the economy's fair or okay, and then you see the economy go up, you can lock in at any point in time, and that will allow you to get the safety net of the fixed again. So I encourage people consider the variable, see what the economy is doing, especially things like COVID where it's holding the economy down. I think the variable rate is definitely safe with COVID right now. But of course, if the economy is improving, you may wanna lock in.
Scott Dillingham:We have to stop for a quick break, but stay tuned because when I come back, I'm gonna show you how you can get $300, but I'm also gonna show you the other tips and strategies to save the maximum amount of money when you're qualifying for a mortgage. Welcome back. So now I'm gonna dive into a line of credit or a mortgage or both. So when you're buying your home, if you're gonna be getting a large annual bonus at the end of the year, if there's some type of inheritance, or if you're buying a home, like if you're qualified today, but you have not sold your home yet, then you may wanna get a line of credit as well as a mortgage. So a lot of banks or lenders will try to get the client to maximize their mortgage, because if you ever make a larger pay down than what your mortgage allows, they can charge you a penalty plus it locks you in.
Scott Dillingham:Because the line of credit, it's a revolving product, it's fully open, paid off, no penalties. So the lenders do prefer you to get a mortgage. Now, if for example, you're not gonna have extra funds immediately, then it will absolutely make sense to get a mortgage because the mortgage has a lower interest than a line of credit. So when you're qualifying for your home, you have to consider what's happening over the next year. If you anticipate any type of bonus or inheritance or again, you're selling your home, then what I would do is I would shrink the size of your mortgage and increase the line of credit so you can pay it off without penalty.
Scott Dillingham:And then you've just got your regular mortgage. Now with lines of credits, there's multiple there's multiple ways that a lender can get a line of credit for you. You can do a lender which will give you just a line of credit for the full balance. So say you go in there and you say, I want a line of credit for 200,000, right, and it's just one line of credit, you can do that. Or there's also lines of credit which you can segment.
Scott Dillingham:I personally like the segmented lines of credits. So for an example, say you need a car. Line of credit interest rate, more often than not, unless it's like a 0% financing, usually lines of credit are cheaper than borrowing for a car. So in this case, say the car was $50, you could segment 50 of that $200,000 line of credit and say this is for the car loan, and you'll have separate statements for that. So if you use the car for business, you'll have separate receipts for write off.
Scott Dillingham:So it's very easy, or as part of what we do at LensCity is we show investors how to invest in real estate and grow their money, and we partner with people who show them how to invest in the stock market and options and all those other things. So a lot of investors will use their lines of credit for specialized investments. So you want a line of credit where you can segment the debt so you can have separate accounting, it makes it really awesome. Your accountant will absolutely love it. Okay?
Scott Dillingham:Another thing that you need to look at when you're qualifying for a mortgage is can you prepay your mortgage and by how much? And I'll give you a perfect example. Most of the major banks and major lenders will allow you to prepay 10% of your mortgage if you choose a five year fixed. So that sounds okay, but it's still limited because some lenders will allow you to pay up to 20% of your mortgage if you get a five year fixed. That may or may not be a bad thing.
Scott Dillingham:Right? You need to look at your available funds coming in, and again, what you anticipate being able to pay down. Because if you can't pay down any extra, then it doesn't matter what the prepayment options are. So you need to look at the budget, what's coming up, and then determine how much you wanna prepay. The other thing with with some of the low mortgage interest rates that you see out there, the ones that are artificially low, like super low, like unheard of that sound too good to be true, usually they are.
Scott Dillingham:They have hidden clauses in there, like you can't refinance them, you can't pay them down. If you try to get rid of the mortgage, they won't let you. The only way you can actually get rid of the mortgage is if you sell your home. So you have to be very careful because I do see clients falling into that trap, and then they come to us after and they're looking to they need to take money out of their home because they wanna renovate some of their property and they can't, they're stuck. So you just have to be very careful because sometimes getting the lowest rate, it really is not the best.
Scott Dillingham:Now that is something that we do as a broker, right, because we work with multiple lenders, is that we do check them and we try to match your needs and what you want with your goals to the lender that has the best rates who can not only meet your goals, but also approve you. Because you don't want to apply and get your hopes up that you're gonna get something that you're not qualified for. So keep that in mind as well that the lowest rate is absolutely not the most important. You have to determine and look at your whole financial picture and then make those decisions. Another tip for saving some money is mortgage plus improvements.
Scott Dillingham:Right? You can add improvement funds. Usually, it's up to $40,000 or 10 to 20% of your purchase price depending on the lender. And by adding the renovations to your mortgage rate upfront, you're not using credit cards or expensive store credit to finance the renovations. And you get to do this right up front when you acquire the home.
Scott Dillingham:So then when you move in, the house is exactly what you want it to be instead of living with it and later on trying to refinance it. And if you've went with a wrong lender and you refinance, right, then you've got a mortgage penalty. So it's often cheaper to build renovations into your mortgage right from the get go. Now there are lenders that can do a lot more than 40,000, but those would they would structure that like a construction mortgage, not a mortgage plus improvements. And there's different rules to that such as there's probably gonna be progress draws where they fund your renovation and stages, which is much more advanced than the plus improvements.
Scott Dillingham:Now how the mortgage plus improvements works is you supply your lender with a quote for the improvements, and then the lender will confirm with the appraiser that your home will be worth that much money when the renovations are done. And if everything lines up, they hold the money and trust, you complete the renovations, and then they release the funds to you. Now one little thing that I've seen with that just from experience is that sometimes the contractors that do the renovations, they wanna get a large deposit upfront and then they get paid at the end. So what we've done for our clients and we'll do it for you too, is we'll write you a letter telling the contractor that you're approved and you're good to go and you're gonna get the funds as soon as the renovation's complete. And usually by showing them that letter, they're okay and they'll move forward, right?
Scott Dillingham:Because a lot of times, like I said, they want their deposit upfront, but if they know you're getting the funds and it's built into your mortgage, usually they will work with you. So that's it for the tips. Now for the $300 so every client of LendCities, what we do is we actually give you a $300 appraisal rebate as soon as your mortgage funds. So if you're looking to refinance, or if you need an appraisal on your purchase and there was a cost associated with it, we will give you the $300 rebate as soon as it closes. So that's something we do for all clients, but you have to have the coupon.
Scott Dillingham:So the coupon is in the book, so you can download the book. Again, you go to lenscity.ca and you click ebooks and you just put in your email address and we'll email you the book, or you can pop in at any time, we've got a bunch of them printed and we'll give you the hard copy of it. And then you can use that for savings. There's no expiry date. So even if you're not ready today and you're thinking of moving in two years, that's fine.
Scott Dillingham:The coupon will still be good for them. But thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope this was valuable for you. On average, like if we look at the numbers, on average, we save clients about $45,000 just by having this information about the hidden fees and things like that. Now that's based on a $500,000 mortgage just from the clients that we've personally worked with.
Scott Dillingham:Every scenario is different. Some clients we could save more, some less, but that's with us knowing what lenders to work with to save you the most money. And that's something by default that we do every single customer we work with. We always try to partner them with the best for their needs to save them the most money without you even asking. But if you have someone that you work with and you wanna stay with them, you'll now know the right questions to ask, so that way you can start saving money.
Scott Dillingham:Thanks so much for tuning in. I can't wait to chat with you next