Get your overtime and shift premium counted on a Sherwood Park mortgage

A lender will count your overtime and shift premium toward a Sherwood Park mortgage, but almost always as a two-year average rather than at last year’s number. That single rule decides more Strathcona County files than anything about the house, and it is the reason two people earning the same money can be quoted very different budgets. I compare 50+ lenders on one application to find the one that reads your income most sensibly.

Base pay is simple. Everything else is where lenders disagree

If your income is a flat salary, qualifying is arithmetic. A great many people here are not paid that way. Shift differentials, overtime, standby pay, annual bonuses, and commission are all real money that shows up on a T4 and all of it gets treated with more caution than base pay, because a lender is asking whether it will still be there in year three.

The standard approach is a two-year average, supported by a letter of employment and two years of T4s or Notices of Assessment. Where lenders part company is in the detail: how much of the average they will use, whether they will look at a shorter history, and what they do when the trend is moving. That variation is exactly the gap a broker exists to work in.

A rising average is read differently from a falling one

Two years is not just a length of time, it is a direction. If your overtime went up from one year to the next, most lenders will use the average and some will lean toward the more recent year. If it went down, expect the lower of the two to carry the weight, and expect questions about why.

None of that is a reason to hide anything, and hiding it does not work anyway. It is a reason to know where you stand before you shop, and occasionally a reason to time an application around a payroll year rather than a listing. That conversation is free, and it is far more useful in January than in the week you fall for a house in Summerwood.

Contract work gets read two different ways

If you work on a renewable contract, some lenders treat you as an employee with two years of history and some route your file into self-employed rules with a different document list. The same person, the same income, two different processes. Settling which one applies to you at the start saves weeks, and where the self-employed path is the right one, self-employed mortgages sets out what that involves.

The same logic applies to anyone whose income arrives from more than one source. Part-time work alongside a main job, rental income, and a spouse’s variable pay all have their own rules, and stacking them properly is often the difference between a townhome budget and a detached one.

Job changes, probation, and the order you do things in

Many lenders will not fund a mortgage while you are on probation with a new employer. Some will, particularly where you moved within the same field and the letter of employment confirms the terms. What I would rather you not do is hand in your notice a fortnight before possession without telling me, because your lender re-verifies employment shortly before funding and that is a hard problem to solve late.

If a move is on the horizon, mention it on the first call. Almost every version of this has a workable sequence, and the sequence is usually free to choose if the choice is made early enough. If you are buying your first home, first-time buyer help covers the down payment side alongside it.

What happens on the first call

Twenty to thirty minutes, no credit check, nothing signed. Bring a rough sense of your base pay and what your variable income has looked like over the last two years, and you will leave knowing a realistic price range, what the payment looks like, and whether waiting for another T4 changes the answer. If you already own here and your term is up, the same call covers whether your renewal offer is competitive. My Edmonton page covers the wider region.