The largest decision most people make, explained after it is made.
A mortgage is signed once and lived with for decades. Almost everything a person is told about it arrives at the point where saying no has become expensive.
What is actually being decided.
A mortgage is signed once and lived with for decades. Almost everything a person is told about it arrives at the point where saying no has become expensive.
What actually goes wrong.
Not a list of villains. A list of places where the record and the relationship come apart, drawn from what the regulators themselves have published.
No documented suitability assessment
FSRA reviewed private mortgage files in 2024-25 and found no documented suitability assessment in every file it looked at. Not a wrong assessment. An absent one.
Material risk left undisclosed
Seventy-three per cent of those files had missing or inadequate disclosure of material risk. The person signed without being told what could go wrong.
Relationship and conflict undisclosed
Sixty-five per cent had missing or inadequate disclosure of the relationship or the conflict. The person did not know whose interest was being served.
Supervision was inadequate everywhere
In every entity examined, supervision was inadequate. The failure was not one broker having a bad month. It was nobody watching.
The same four moments, in this decision.
Every industry on this site gets the same four moments, because the relationship is the thing that repeats. Only the decision changes.
Before a broker exists
The person understands what a pre-approval is and is not, what a lender will actually ask for, and what their own numbers look like, before anyone has anything to sell.
When the relationship starts
Identity is verified once. Income is supported by a document rather than stated. What gets shared is chosen by the person, item by item, and recorded.
While the file moves
If the income on the application stops matching the income in the record, both sides see it while it can still be a correction rather than an allegation.
When it is asked about, years later
The story is already assembled: what was said, what was shown, what was agreed, and why this mortgage rather than another one.
Better financial decisions start with better relationships.
The person understands what they are deciding. The firm can show how it was handled. Both of those come out of the same conversation.