Talking with award winning Vancouver, BC Realtor Paul Toffoli about financing

Mark: Hi, it’s Mark Bossert from Top Local Lead Generation. We’re here with award winning realtor Mr. Paul Toffoli in Vancouver, BC. How’re this morning, Paul?

Paul: I’m really well Mark

Mark: So, we’re working our way through the BC real estate buying process and we’re up to, what for some people is the challenging stuff, we’re talking about financing. So how does getting your financing pre-approved help you with buying a house?

Paul: Well, it should be self explanatory, but I’m betting for some people it’s not because as part of the process, it’s very important to understand what you can afford. For many people it’s not so clear, I mean even for myself, I look at all sorts of numbers out there and wait a minute, where do I fit in that picture? I’d love to live in a four bedroom house on the West Side of Vancouver. What’s that going to cost me and what can I afford? So, one thing that I highly recommend is to work with a mortgage broker or work with your financial institution to get pre approved for your mortgage. It’s a very straight forward process, all of it can be done over the phone and emails, though some people prefer a personal touch and I think it makes a lot of sense if you have a relationship with someone or there’s a mortgage broker that you would like to work with if you can do some of it face to face I think that really helps the process. But really what you’re going to do, there’s a list of questions that the mortgage broker is going to have, they’re going to run a credit check to make sure you don’t have any skeletons in your closet that you may have forgotten about or you may have not even known about - do you have an outstanding cell bill? is your MasterCard payments down? - things that people don’t even think about sometimes - they think ‘Oh, I make $75,000 per year, I’m paying rent of so much’, etc etc, they forget about that car payment - that’s oh my goodness, that’s $300 bucks a month that’s coming out of my debt service ratio that I can’t put towards my mortgage. So if you go ahead, early in the process and meet with a mortgage professional, they will go through all that with you, they will give you advice, should you accelerate those car payments, maybe take some money out of savings, pay off the car so you don’t have that debt showing up, those monthly payments showing up on your approval. Go through the whole process, they will then say, this is what the banks will lend you comfortably, this is how much down payment you have, if it’s less than 20% down, this is the amount of mortgage insurance it’s going to cost you every month and go from there.

Once you’ve gone through that process then you can comfortably go out and look at properties and you can say, yes this is within my price range. We can afford that $450,000 bungalow in Langley or maybe it’s a $550,000 bungalow in Langley, or we can afford that two bedroom condo in East Vancouver. Knowing what your affordability is, is absolutely critical to the buying process.

Mark: You can contact Paul Toffoli by giving him a call at 604-787-6963 or visit his website www.toffoli.ca.