Getting a mortgage in Canada (as US residents now)

[Jayjayem]

Hi everyone,

We're contemplating a move to Canada, and wondering how to best plan getting a mortgage for a house.

I'm a dual US/Canada citizen, with no credit history or assets in Canada. I've FIREd.
Husband is a US citizen who's in the process of getting his Canada PR through me. No credit history in Canada. We'd like to move to Canada when he FIREs next year and the Canadian permanent residency for him would kick in then.

My questions:
(1) How easy is it for retired people (no wage job) to get a Canadian mortgage? I'd hate to pay cash for the house.
(2) How easy is it for non-residents to get a Canadian mortgage? I'm assuming it'll be hard to get a mortgage without a regular paystub job. In which case, my husband who is a non-resident would be the primary applicant because he still works.

One idea is to buy a house now as a second home/investment property when he still has a job, and make it our primary residence when we actually move to Canada.

(3) Do you have any good resources for building Canadian credit? We plan on applying for secured credit cards to get started, but I feel like it'll take forever to build a credit history strong enough to get a mortgage in Canada.

We anticipate a move in the next 2 years. Any tips or resources would be appreciated!
JJM

[daverobev]

Get an Amex card and do a global transfer - that'll kickstart your credit in Canada. Also, any of the big banks have immigrant packages - you'll get a credit card along with that. But yeah it'll be 2 years before you can really do anything with that.

But! Try talking to RBC, TD, BMO about mortgages before you move - they all have US stuff, and are more likely to be able to deal with you based on your US credit. And/or a mortgage broker that has some understanding of US people. I am sure they'll be able to work something out with a large enough downpayment. Note that Canada doesn't really do fixed-for-life-of-mortgage mortgages; you tend to get maximum 5 year fixes on a ~25 year amortisation.

The US is big enough that I'm sure the brokers have seen Americans coming up north in your situation.

[Jayjayem]

Thanks for the tip on Amex! I've with them forever and it's good to know that I could leverage them to kickstart.

Good to know on the big banks and the 5-yr rates too.

[FLBiker]

We moved in July 2020 as newly minted permanent residents (both US citizens).  We purchased a house (seen only via FaceTime) and didn't actually have any trouble getting a mortgage.  Both RBC and CIBC were willing to use our US credit history.  We went with CIBC because the person I was in contact with at RBC didn't know how to use their secure message portal and wanted me to email her everything (I even sent her the link to it).  I suspect TD would have been fine, too.  CIBC was easy to deal with, though, and gave us a great rate.  Tangerine wouldn't talk to us without a Canadian mailing address (and we've since gotten a credit card from them and found them to be terrible -- you can't set up autopay without a Tangerine bank account, and their customer service is really lousy).

I can't really speak about the no job part, but the non resident part shouldn't be a big deal.

And we haven't had any trouble building credit.  As soon as we got up here, I started applying for fancy credit cards (to get things like free roadside assistance) and I've never been turned down.  Again, though, I have an income, and that seems like most of what they're concerned with.

[Jayjayem]

We moved in July 2020 as newly minted permanent residents (both US citizens).  We purchased a house (seen only via FaceTime) and didn't actually have any trouble getting a mortgage.  Both RBC and CIBC were willing to use our US credit history.  We went with CIBC because the person I was in contact with at RBC didn't know how to use their secure message portal and wanted me to email her everything (I even sent her the link to it).  I suspect TD would have been fine, too.  CIBC was easy to deal with, though, and gave us a great rate.  Tangerine wouldn't talk to us without a Canadian mailing address (and we've since gotten a credit card from them and found them to be terrible -- you can't set up autopay without a Tangerine bank account, and their customer service is really lousy).

I can't really speak about the no job part, but the non resident part shouldn't be a big deal.

And we haven't had any trouble building credit.  As soon as we got up here, I started applying for fancy credit cards (to get things like free roadside assistance) and I've never been turned down.  Again, though, I have an income, and that seems like most of what they're concerned with.

That is really good to know. Thanks @FLBiker