The “Big Five” Canadian banks offer credit cards and include Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto Dominion Bank (TD Canada Trust), Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). Did you know that there are many other options?
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Buy a house with cash or mortgage?
– moneysense.ca
(Stuart Dee/Getty Images)Q: My husband and I are both 60 and working full time. We’ve just made an offer to purchase a house for $75,000 that we will use as a cottage. We have $30,000 in cash for the purchase but could take money out of our TFSAs to pay full price for the place. Thing is, the cottage needs extensive renovations which we think will take about two years to complete and will cost us roughly $50,000. Once all this work is done, we plan to rent out the property for $1,000 per week for 15 to 20 weeks each year.
We’d like to know if it would be better to pay the full $75,000 purchase price now, and slowly do the renovations using our homeowner’s line of credit. If it gets high enough, we could renegotiate this debt into our primary home mortgage. Or should we use our $30,000 cash as a down payment, get a mortgage for $45,000 and use a combination of our TFSA money and line of credit for the renovations?
— Debra Hamel, Ontario
Nawar Naji, mortgage broker with Mortgage Architects:
A: Since mortgage rates are at historic lows it makes sense to buy the cottage with just a 20% down payment and mortgage the rest…
