Find out how much home you can buy!
Before you begin house hunting, you should set a realistic budget for home much home you can buy. Our simple to use calculator was designed to help Canadian first-time buyers find out the highest priced new home they can afford to buy. It’s much more than a mortgage calculator, our calculator is fully loaded and will estimate the maximum house price, mortgage amount, property transfer taxes, and sales taxes. Just answer a few simple questions and get a realistic estimate.
Decide how much of your savings you will put toward the purchase.
This is a key question in the What Can I Afford. Obviously, the more savings you dedicate to you purchase the more house you can buy but you also need to thing about other uses of those savings, like saving retirement or an upcoming vacation.
Generally, lenders will match 4 dollars for every dollar you put in (e.g, $80 thousand mortgage with a $20 thousand down payment), but there are programs that help you borrow more, and we’ve built these into the calculation.
Surprisingly, not all first-time home buyers are dipping into their savings. According to Mortgage Professionals Canada, 92% of first time home buyers draw on personal savings for their down payment and many get help from their parents. 43% are gifted money from their parents and 19% borrow from their parents.
Use "What Can I Afford" to find out your estimated home buying budget.
What Can I Afford is our advanced mortgage calculator that estimates your maximum home buying budget, including closing costs and mortgage default insurance. Housing affordability is a hot topic with new mortgage rules and higher interest rates squeezing home buyer budgets. Some families will qualify for 20% less than they did two years ago!
What Can I Afford, will tell you the estimated maximum purchase price you should be able to offer. It isn’t recommending that you spend that much on a home, but it is providing a fair estimate of your upper price limit.
Once you have a fair estimate of what you can afford, you can prepare for a meeting with mortgage broker and real estate agent. Before you meet them, you should have:
Figure out your requirements for a home.
Make a list of amenities you need in your neighbourhood.
Set your financing priorities.
We want you to have the best possible home buying experience. Use our Home Buyer Guide to walk you through these activities.
