When I was growing up, my parents moved
a couple of times, and each time they did the same thing: My dad would go to
the bank (“our bank” my parents would call it) and sit with someone there and
then come away with a mortgage. That’s not the way it works anymore. Today, my
spouse and I both meet with a local mortgage broker – a Vancouver mortgage
professional who helps find flexible payment options for us.
Today, dads are no longer the main
breadwinners, nor are mortgages the same financial instrument they once were.
Here’s what my mortgage broker did for us:
·
The job market has changed and
is far less secure than in dad’s day (no more “jobs for life!) We want to pay
less on our mortgage and a mortgage broker helps find mortgages that cost less
over the life of the loan as well as on a monthly basis.
·
As freelancers (I’m a
photographer and my wife is a graphic designer) our income is pretty good but
frankly it’s all over the map – we go from boom to bust and back to boom again.
Our bank is still stuck in the Stone Age and didn’t “get” this but our mortgage
broker nodded, smiled, and said it wouldn’t be a problem… they even found us a
mortgage where we could skip occasional payments or pre-pay without penalty.
· We were able to select the days
of the month we wanted our payments to come out – multiple payments and the
frequency of those payments (and our mortgage broker even showed us a trick to
pay off our mortgage a little sooner by helping us “sneak in” an extra couple
of payments a year).
·
Our favorite: Our Vancouver mortgage
professional helped find flexible payment options at zero cost to us. This was
a service to us that was essentially free – keeping more money in our pocket
while finding the best rate out there.
I learned that mortgages are like
complex machines with all kinds of “buttons” – from payments schedules to
interest rate and more. And our mortgage broker pushed all the right buttons to
find a mortgage that worked for our unique situation.
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