Soaring house prices have made Canadians wealthy on paper, but what are households giving up in order to make their mortgage payments? As part of our package on the financial squeeze being felt by Canadian homeowners, we profiled six families across the country to see how they are coping.
When Leanna Poda and her then-husband bought their newly constructed two-storey detached house in the new neighbourhood of Copperfield, in Calgary's "deep south," a decade ago, it all seemed like a sensible plan: A bigger house to accommodate their growing family and a new property that wouldn't come with the constant maintenance headaches of the old house they were leaving.
Sure, there were sacrifices – the longer commute from a remote corner of the city, where the properties were more affordable, and opting for an unfinished basement and backyard to keep the costs down – but it seemed worth it to get into a house their family could grow with.
But as the family grew, so did the burden. Finishing the basement and fencing and landscaping the yard was hard and expensive. Their brood expanded to four kids. Four years ago, they remortgaged the property to raise financing for her husband to buy a business, increasing the debt to $390,000. The business subsequently failed. So did their marriage.
Now, Ms. Poda, a database administrator with an investment bank, finds herself on a single income – and part-time, at that – trying to keep her sizable family's financial head above water. The mortgage payments of $1,600 a month consume almost half of her take-home pay. And because of the remortgaging, she has almost no equity in a property she has been paying into for a decade.
"I have no savings. I'm going from paycheque to paycheque, trying to juggle things around," she says.
And yet, she feels she can't move, either.
"My hands are tied. I can't sell the house because there's no equity. I can't qualify for a mortgage on my own," she says. "If I were to sell the house and rent some place, I can't get in with me and four kids for less than $1,600."
"I'm kind of stuck here."
Photo by Todd Korol for The Globe and Mail
More from this project
