Update as of Jan 29, 2021
It’s been a while since I wrote anything on my site, maybe over 2 years. I have neglected this site for other sites I was managing.
Originally, I created the site to be a directory of mortgage brokers. But, now, I’ll be changing this more into to a blog about debt and personal finance, investing, and small business.
I’ll be writing articles about how to pay off your mortgage, mortgage brokers, and personal finance to help you save money and avoid pitfalls when getting your mortgage and buying your home.
At the same time, I believe that paying off your mortgage should be approached from 2 directions. The first, saving money, is one that most personal finance articles seems to be about. The second, however, is key to paying it off even faster, and that’s about increasing your income. And that’s something I’ll be focusing on much more.
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Who is behind Mortgage Crunch?
Cedric Liem
Hi, my name is Cedric Liem. although this blog was technically up and running at the end of April 2017, at the time, I was a stay at home dad with a 1 year old daughter. She’s started part time daycare in December 2017, so it’s only now that I’ve got some time on my hands to devote to this website.
I have a strong personal interest in this area as someone who has bought and paid off two homes now (sequentially, I don’t own 2 homes) and went through several realtors with some bad experiences including one that left me for 4 days while he headed of to Montreal to party while I entertained the 30 plus visitors over the period.
So, he leaves on Thursday night, lists my place on Friday, I show 30+ visitors, he returns Monday night, we accept bids on Tuesday and then it’s sold Wednesday. I ended up paying $15k in commissions! This was for a condo. And, no, it wasn’t a million dollar condo. It wasn’t even close to half of that. What a great deal! For him, that is!
To top it off, this realtor and I haggled over the listing price. He told me the price I wanted to list for was probably $20k to $30k overvalued. I decided on using my listing price and we ended up selling $40k over listing! No thanks to him though, as you can probably infer.
The other realtor forgot to put a bid through for a place and my bid was the highest bid! I didn’t get the place, obviously, although presumably, I would have since it was $5k higher than what the place sold for and I didn’t have any conditions.
Living in Toronto, I’ve been through the madness having lost 4 different bids before getting my current home, even one where I bid $80,000 over asking with no conditions and they didn’t get back to me – yeah, really, my bid was too low.
I called the selling agent to make sure in case something happened between my broker and the seller’s broker (because that’s happened to me before) and he said he got my bid, but, it wasn’t good enough, that’s why they didn’t call me back. What, are you kidding me??? I didn’t think it was undervalued to get a bidding war either. It seemed like fair market value.
I even know one guy who bid $50,000 over asking without even looking inside the house! He didn’t get that either!
Those were the days! I’ve learned some interesting things from these experiences and from people I know.
Despite all the fear mongering commercials from the real estate association you see about buying a house without having a real estate agent, I realize it’s just that – fear mongering. I didn’t quite see the need for any of the agents I used and I could have saved quite a lot of money. Plus, look at these issues that happened to buyers who used an agent:
Reneging on Stoufville Couple ordered to pay $470,000 after reneging on Ontario home deal
Buyer beware: Ontario courts punish home purchasers who default on their offers
Yes, I realize three articles doesn’t mean all realtors are bad. But, I’m just responding to stupid real estate commercials with stupid answers 🙂 And if I wanted to search, I could add more.
Who you really need is a good real estate lawyer and solid financing through a lender or mortgage broker. Although most people think you need to get a real estate agent first when buying or selling your home, the fact is, from my experience, the real estate agent is the least important between the mortgage broker (or lender), real estate lawyer, and real estate agent.
There are definitely times when you need them, but, for me, when buying in your own neighbourhood, I didn’t see the value in them.
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