Most people never hear from their broker again after closing

The four calls in the first year

The first year is where everything is new and where the questions nobody expects turn up. It is also where the file is most fragile. So the contact is front-loaded on purpose.

7 days: a check in

This one is simple and it is not about the mortgage. I want to know everything is going well, that you are comfortable in the new home, and to say congratulations. Moving is exhausting and the week after possession is usually the first time anyone has drawn breath.

45 days: did the first payment come out right

By now your first payment has gone through, so we check it came out on the date and in the amount it should have. We also sort out property taxes and home insurance, which are the two things most likely to be half-finished at this point, and whatever else has come up. This call tends to run long, because forty-five days in is when people have accumulated a list.

6 months: another check in

How is it going, is there anything you need to talk to me about, and do you want to book time to go through something properly. Sometimes the answer is no and the call takes four minutes. Sometimes somebody has been sitting on a question about paying extra, or a change at work, or a renovation they are considering, and it turns into the most useful conversation of the year.

11 months: the annual review, deliberately early

This is the one with a technical reason behind it, and it is the clearest example of what planning the mortgage actually means.

The way a break penalty is calculated can change when your mortgage crosses into a new year of its term. Depending on the method your lender uses, the penalty can get either bigger or smaller. Running the review at eleven months means there is still time to do strategy on that: whether it is worth changing something, breaking the mortgage, or moving it, while the window is open. At twelve months the number has already turned over and the decision has been made for you by the calendar.

Then once a year, for as long as you have the mortgage

After the first year the mortgage settles down and the conversation changes job. It stops being about whether things are working and starts being a review of whether the plan still fits.

Three things I am looking for. Whether rates have moved far enough that an early renewal would leave you ahead even after a penalty, which is a calculation rather than an automatic yes, but somebody should be running it. Whether your equity has grown enough to solve something else, like clearing high-interest debt, funding a renovation, or building a secondary suite. And whether anything has changed for you: income up or down, a child arriving or leaving, a separation, a business started, a retirement approaching.

From the second-to-last year of your term, the annual review is already a renewal conversation.

The renewal runway

About four months before your maturity date, the conversation gets concrete. That is when most lenders will hold a rate for you, and a held rate is a floor rather than a ceiling: you are protected if the market rises and you still benefit if it falls. It is the most favourable asymmetry in this entire process and it is only available to people who start early.

For contrast, federally regulated lenders only have to send your renewal statement 21 days before the end of your term. Twenty-one days is enough time to sign and return it. It is not enough time to compare the market, gather a document if one is needed, and arrange a switch. Whoever chose that number was not thinking about you.

The detail of how renewals work, including the rule that changed in November 2024, is on the mortgage renewals page.

Who to call about what

You are never wrong to start with me. If it is not my job I will tell you in one message and point you at whoever it is. But since people ask:

• The mortgage itself, meaning payment changes, prepayments, a skipped payment, porting to a new home, or a renewal: me first.
• Property taxes: your municipality, or the lender if your taxes are collected along with your payment.
• Home insurance: your insurer. Worth reviewing annually, because it drifts.
• A payment that did not come out: the lender, urgently, and then tell me.
• Anything where you are not sure who to ask: me.

Why I do it this way

Arranging a mortgage is a few weeks of work. The mortgage itself lasts twenty-five years. Almost the entire industry is organised around those few weeks, which is why the normal experience is intense attention followed by years of nothing.

The decisions that determine what a mortgage actually costs you are spread across the whole term, not concentrated at the start. The term you pick, whether you use your prepayment privileges, whether you catch a rate move, how you handle a renewal: those add up to far more than the difference between a good rate and a slightly better one on day one.

That is the difference between a broker and a planner, and it is why I use the second word. There is more on that, and on how I got here, on the about page.

What this costs you: nothing

Nothing. Every call on this page is included, for as long as you have the mortgage, whether or not there is anything in it for me that year. On standard mortgages the lender pays me when a mortgage funds, and the follow-up is simply part of the work rather than a separate service.

I will also say the obvious: a client I have looked after for five years is a client who comes back and who sends me people. That is the business case, and I would rather say it out loud than pretend the arrangement is charity.