The wire that had to prove itself

Before this file could move, the lender needed to know exactly where the $77,500 came from — not because the amount looked wrong, but because a large deposit from an international source has to be explained, not just noticed. FINTRAC-related client-identification obligations exist precisely for deposits like this one, and a lender's own anti-money-laundering policy treats an unexplained wire as a compliance problem long before it is treated as a down payment.

Left undocumented, a deposit this size is often subjected to a 90-day seasoning period before a lender will treat it as the borrower's own money — a delay this purchase's closing date could not have absorbed. A newcomer down payment of this size also sits well above what national down payment statistics show as typical, which is exactly why a lender wants the source nailed down rather than assumed.

The mortgage math itself was never the issue on this file. Qualifying at $8,200/mo in confirmed income against a $232,500 mortgage left real room on both ratios — the numbers below exist to show that clearly, not to solve a ratio problem.

Both ratios sit well inside CMHC's 39% GDS and 44% TDS maximums, though this file is uninsured at 25% down and isn't bound by either ceiling. The point of showing them is simple: nothing about the borrowers' capacity was ever the obstacle here.

A Prince Edward Island mortgage broker treated the wire as a documentation project, not a ratio problem.

First, assembled the foreign sale agreement and the notary's proceeds statement. These established the original source of the money in the seller's own currency, before any conversion or transfer happened — the same standard a broker applies to any FINTRAC client-identification requirement, just applied earlier in the file rather than after a lender asked twice.

Second, matched the SWIFT wire confirmation to the exact amount that landed in the Canadian account, accounting for the small difference wire fees and currency conversion always create, so the paper trail read as one continuous line from sale to deposit instead of two numbers a lender had to reconcile on their own.

Third, kept the Canadian-sourced $5,500 separate and simple — clearly identified as ordinary employment savings, not folded into the same explanation as the traced down payment source documentation, so the lender saw two clean stories instead of one blended one.

The lender accepted the funds as fully sourced without requiring a seasoning period, and the purchase closed on schedule at 4.75%, with GDS at 23.3% and TDS at 26.4%.

Because every dollar of the down payment traced to a document, the file needed no exception and no manual override — only the standard identification and source-of-funds package a large international deposit always requires.

• 01A large international deposit is a documentation problem, not a red flag, once it's traced. The size of the wire was never the issue — the absence of a paper trail would have been.
• 02Match the wire confirmation to the deposit, not just the sale agreement to the down payment. Wire fees and currency conversion always create a small gap; explain it rather than leave it for the lender to notice.
• 03Keep sourced and unsourced funds visually separate in the file. Blending the foreign proceeds with ordinary Canadian savings into one lump sum invites more questions than documenting each separately.
• 04A 90-day seasoning period exists to solve a problem this file didn't have. Full documentation on day one closed faster than waiting out a seasoning clock on an unexplained deposit would have.