Manulife offers two types of mortgages:

1. Manulife One

A Manulife One mortgage is their “one-stop-shop” mortgage that provides comprehensive services to meet your specific banking and lending needs. This can be an excellent option if you don’t like your current bank or are not particularly tied to their services. Choosing Manulife One allows you to get a better interest rate and quicker access to further credit if you need it. In addition, with everything connected, including your mortgage financing, a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC), and transaction account, it makes it easier to manage your finances. 

For example, you can apply your savings to your mortgage and access your home equity when you need extra money. As a result, you can pay off your mortgage sooner if your financial situation changes for the better without worrying about penalties that other lenders apply for early repayment. Also, it uses a daily interest calculation, allowing any deposits you make to counterbalance your debt temporarily.

The best thing about the Manulife One option is that as a readvanceable mortgage, it is highly customizable in ways you wouldn’t think possible for a mortgage. For example, they allow you to set up a fixed mortgage and then have a subaccount at a variable rate, so if interest rates fall below the fixed rate, you can choose to apply your payments using your variable rate.

There are two potential ways to set up your Manulife One banking:

  I.     Consolidate: You can consolidate your accounts at a single rate of interest or

  II.     By project: You can assign interest rates based on different financial needs.

When you decide you need to access your HELOC for something like home improvements, your interest rate is at the HELOC rate. The more you pay on your mortgage balance, the more credit you have available.

2. Manulife Select

With Select Mortgages, you can customize your mortgage and “portion” it using the best interest rates, terms, and payment schedules to suit your needs. As a result, if you want to allot a specific portion to a variable mortgage, you can limit the risk of having your entire mortgage subject to rising rates yet still take advantage of lower rates for that portion of your mortgage. 

You have up to five portion options, including the choice to set up some portions with a closed mortgage and others as open. By using this strategy, you can pay down your mortgage faster when you have access to unexpected funds such as a tax refund, a raise, a better job, etc., and increase your payments without worry of prepayment penalties. In addition, this completely customizable option allows you to do things your way based on the risk you are willing to take.

Manulife Bank Background

Manulife was founded in 1887 by Sir John A. Macdonald. Not only was he Manulife’s President, but also the first Prime Minister of Canada. The institute began expanding in 1893, starting in the Caribbean, and shortly after to Asia in 1897 and then the United States in 1903. They continued to grow in the 1980s and 1990s with multiple mergers and acquisitions. The acquisition of U.S.-based John Hancock Financial Services in 2004 was the largest acquisition to date, making Manulife the largest life insurer in Canada and the second largest in North America. It is now the fifth-largest life insurer in the world.

• The oil and gas industry
• Homeowners’ financial health at the start of the pandemic
• Policy actions the province took to help bridge recovery from the pandemic
• The Alberta labour market’s post-pandemic recovery
• Interest rates for the individual