Saskatoon Mortgage Broker shares article on Comparing Canada’s housing market with the high rates of 1981

Comparing Canada’s housing market with the high rates of 1981

Rob Carrick, The Globe and Mail, June 28, 2015

If George Orwell had written a dystopian novel about Canada’s housing market, it might have been called 1981.

That was the year mortgage rates reached levels that now seem like a plot of some oppressive force designed to terrify the population into submission. For several months, both one- and five-year fixed-rate mortgages were in the high teens and even, for a while, above 20 per cent.

The point of this heritage moment in personal finance is to provide some context for the cost of carrying a mortgage in today’s housing market. It was much worse back then if you use inflation-adjusted data. That simply means making 1981 dollars directly comparable to 2015 dollars, an easy trick using the Bank of Canada’s online inflation calculator.

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