Mortgage premium hikes reduce case for borrowing to boost down payment + MORE Mar 19th

WASHINGTON, United States of America – A wrecking ball is coming for the labour market, analysts warn. One such example: an Oxford study that concludes 47 per cent of jobs risk being automated.
As computer-processing power doubles each year and machines learn from their mistakes, the upcoming federal budget will examine the potential of artificial intelligence to disrupt — industries, politics, and entire societies.
RELATED: When robots steal your job
It’s been mostly blue-collar workers hit so far, but Oxford researchers concluded white-collar jobs are next. They found the most at-risk jobs involve repetitive tasks, like telemarketing, tax-preparing, and insurance underwriting. The safest jobs involved unpredictability and interpersonal skills — sparing psychologists, surgeons and social workers from labour’s endangered-species list.
Another study offers a more nuanced view.
McKinsey researchers argue it’s not careers being wiped out — just individual tasks…

Q: I am 69 and have approximately $600,000 but I’m afraid to invest in equities. What strategy should I use and how do I get over this fear?
– Richard

A: There are good evolutionary reasons for why people are afraid of sharks and snakes, since they’re potentially dangerous. Investing in equities also carries some very real risks—namely that you can lose large sums of money with shocking swiftness. Even a fully diversified portfolio of stocks lost about half its value during the worst six months of the 2008–09 crisis. So, Richard, I don’t think you should try to “get over this fear,” because it’s a perfectly reasonable one.
I suggest you start by determining how much risk you need to take with your investments in order to reach your financial goals. Don’t do this on the back of an envelope: it’s worth hiring a fee-only financial planner to run the numbers. (Avoid using a planner who is paid by commissions from investment or insurance products, as there’s too much potential for conflict of interest…

Caisse has been overhauling its approach to private equity in the past few years, looking toward direct investments

The CMHC is raising mortgage insurance premiums as of today.
Luckily, if you already have a mortgage or if you applied for one before March 17, these changes won’t affect you. If you’re planning to buy a home with a down payment of less than 20%, however, be aware that you’ll have to pay a little more every month—which adds up to quite a lot over a typical 25-year amortization period.
The premium rates for new mortgage loan applications are as follows:

Down payment %
Standard premium (current)
Standard premium (before March 17)

5% to 9.99%
4%
3.6%

10% to 14.99%
3.1%
2.4%

15% to 19.99%
2.8%
1.8%

Depending on where you live in the country and the price of your home, you could pay anywhere between $2 and $17 extra a month in CMHC premiums. On average, Canadians could pay an extra $2,600 over the course of 25 years.
RateHub has crunched the numbers to show Canadians exactly how much more they can expect to pay monthly across the country. See their helpful infographic below…

With mortgage insurance premiums rising, homebuyers whose down payments are just shy of 20 per cent may be considering whether to tap extra sources of credit in order to avoid the higher costs.
But mortgage brokers say recent government rule changes lessen the case for doing so because people may end up paying a higher interest rate on their mortgage in addition to the additional debt they will have to repay.
“What we’re seeing in the market now is people that have insured mortgages are getting much better interest rates than someone with 20 per cent down,” says Steve Pipkey, co-founder of Vancouver-based Spin Mortgage.
Ottawa announced new restrictions last fall to portfolio insurance, a type of bulk insurance that lenders would use to insure mortgages with down payments of 20 per cent or more.
That has made it more difficult for lenders to insure mortgages with lower loan-to-value ratios and resulted in more competitive rates for borrowers with smaller down payments, brokers say…