The Real Cost of Financing a Mortgage

The real cost of financing a mortgage 

I purchased a pre-construction condo for the amount of $426,900.00 in 2006 and have documents showing I paid a $64,000.00 down payment toward this purchase. The condo was ready in Nov 2007 and originally my mortgage started with Maple Trust. After two years of mortgage payments to this company, we learned that Maple Trust merged with the Bank of Nova Scotia. I then transferred the mortgage to TD Canada Trust April 1, 2009. Despite having paid more than $50,000.00 mortgage payments to Maple Trust, our mortgage with TD started at $388,806.40! 

For many reasons, I decided to sell our condo in 2013. The mortgage maturity date was June 1, 2014, and the closing balance on our mortgage was $337,505.56 as of Nov 29, 2013. My notary public agent paid the full amount owing to TD Bank including a $2200.00 penalty for terminating our mortgage before it expired. The closing balance was $339,876.03. To my surprise, TD bank continued taking money toward the discharged mortgage account from my checking account on the evening of Nov 29, 2013 ($404.11) and Dec 6, 2013 ($404.11). However, a withdrawal of $404.11 was returned to my account immediately, giving me the impression that someone did not disable automatic mortgage debiting until Dec 6, 2013. 

Despite my request, I was never reimbursed the $404.11 for TD Bank’s Nov 29, 2013 withdrawal, nor have I received any discharge statement from TD Bank as of Feb 3, 2013 in spite of numerous requests for them. The point is that the TD Bank manager states that even though the notary public paid my mortgage debt to TD Bank on Nov 29, 2013, I was still responsible for paying one additional payment on the discharged account and she refuses to reimburse me for this additional payment. 

My result of paying my TD Bank mortgage for almost 6 years is that almost all money they took from me was for interest payments, with very little going to reduce my debt. Adding insult to injury is the fact that I now am faced with paying TD Bank even more – this time in the form of a $2000.00 penalty because I ended this mortgage six months prior to the expiry date of June 1, 2014. Did I become poorer by dealing with this mortgage or was it a huge mistake to buy a condo in the first place and give thousands of dollars interest to the banks?!