The bank said no and the money is needed now: private and second mortgages in Calgary

Josh Tagg is a Calgary mortgage broker who takes private and second mortgage files across Alberta — including the ones that start with a CRA balance, a lien threat or a lender that has stopped returning calls. He leads the Mortgages for Less team at INDI Mortgage, has been arranging mortgages in Alberta since 2006, took over the brokerage his father founded in 2003, and is licensed by the Real Estate Council of Alberta. The team holds a 5.0 rating from close to 300 Google reviews. This office also places money from its own private mortgage funds, alongside lenders like Alta West Capital and CMI Financial, which is why the answer on the first call is usually a real structure and a real cost rather than a promise to look into it. If you have equity and a deadline, send us the numbers and we will tell you what the money costs, what it clears, and how you get out of it — including when the honest answer is that you should not borrow it at all. Book a call, apply online, or phone (403) 241-3255.

Every figure on this page comes from files this office actually funded, published in full in the case studies linked below. Names and identifying details are changed; the numbers and the sequence are real.

What a private second mortgage is, and why anyone would pay for one

A second mortgage is registered against your home behind the mortgage you already have. Your first mortgage does not move, is not broken, and carries no penalty, because you are not touching it. A private lender then advances money against whatever equity sits underneath.

The reason people pay private rates is almost never that they cannot get a cheaper mortgage. It is that the cheaper mortgage takes weeks they do not have, or needs income they cannot document this month. A bank refinance is capped at 80% of your home’s value and requires you to qualify on income and credit. A private lender is looking mainly at the property, the equity position and how you plan to get out.

So the trade is simple and worth stating plainly: you are buying speed and flexibility with money. If you have six weeks and provable income, you should almost certainly not be on this page — you should be refinancing, and we will tell you so.

What it actually costs — the whole number, not the rate

This is the part the industry is vague about, so here is a complete, real one. A Calgary household with a clean mortgage, bruised credit and a CRA balance took a $100,000 private second mortgage on a twelve-month term. The full file is published here.

Two ways to read that total, and you should be given both. Measured against the $100,000 borrowed, twelve months of this money costs about 20%. Measured against the $90,000 that actually reached the borrowers, it is closer to 22%. Anyone quoting you “ten percent” and stopping there has told you less than half of it.

Josh Tagg publishes these figures because almost nobody else in Calgary will. Every competing private-mortgage page we measured before writing this one — including the brokerages an AI assistant recommends for exactly this question — describes the product without printing a single rate, fee or total. You cannot compare an offer against a description.

“Ask for the total cost to borrow and the exact payout amount”

That sentence is not ours. It is the advice an AI assistant gave a Calgary homeowner who asked this exact question — and it is good advice, because almost nobody publishes the answer. So here are the four questions, and what they were on the file above:

If a lender or broker will not put all four in writing in the commitment before you sign, that is the answer to a different question.

Will a lender advance it? The number that decides is combined loan-to-value

A private lender adds your existing first mortgage and the new second together, and measures the total against what the home is worth. That figure — combined loan-to-value — is what the decision turns on.

65% was comfortable enough for a private lender to move in days. Every lender sets its own ceiling, and it moves with the property, the town and the market — so we will not print a number here and pretend it is a rule. What is worth knowing is the two things that quietly decide it:

• The appraisal is the value, not your tax assessment. On this file the city assessed the home at $558,000 and the appraiser came in at $500,000. We underwrote to the lower number, because that is the one the lender lends against. Any plan built on the assessment would have fallen apart at the worst moment.
• A clean mortgage payment history is worth more than your score. Those borrowers had credit scores of 574 and 616. Their mortgage had never once been late. To a private lender those two facts point in opposite directions, and the mortgage history is the one that wins — the damage was maxed-out revolving balances, not missed payments.

The CRA half: what tax debt does to a mortgage file

A large share of the private second mortgages we write exist because of money owed to the Canada Revenue Agency, so it deserves its own section.

Unpaid tax debt is not like a credit card balance. The CRA can take collection steps other creditors cannot, and an unpaid balance can end up registered against your home. Once that happens your financing options narrow sharply, because a lender advancing new money needs to know what sits ahead of it on title. That is the real reason banks so often refuse a file with tax arrears outstanding: not disapproval, but priority.

Clearing the balance through a mortgage advance removes that problem before it forms. On the file above, ~$8,600 of CRA arrears and ~$3,200 of the year’s property taxes were paid by the lawyer directly out of the advance, as a condition of funding — not handed to the borrowers to pay. Property taxes matter here for the same reason: unpaid municipal taxes rank ahead of a mortgage.

Three ways out, and what each one really costs

On a file like this there are usually three routes, and the cheapest is rarely the fastest. The mistake is not choosing the expensive one — it is choosing it without knowing the other two existed.

On the published file the cheapest route was real, and we said so on the first call. With one borrower out of work for close to two years, a full refinance meant a complete underwrite and an income story that would take weeks the family did not have. So we did not pick one route — we staged them. Phase one stops the bleeding now with expensive money. Phase two replaces it with the cheap answer that was always right, once credit has recovered. The entire job is making certain phase one cannot trap you.

The clause that decides whether this traps you

If you read one thing in a private mortgage commitment, read the prepayment terms. A rescue loan you cannot leave is not a rescue.

The loan on the published file was written fully open with no penalty, deliberately, so that the day their credit recovered enough to qualify for normal money, leaving cost them nothing. That is the difference between a bridge and a trap, and it is decided on the day you sign, not the day you leave. It is also the question to ask first: what does it cost me to get out of this on day one?

What happens, day by day

This is the sequence from the published file — first phone call to money out the door in six days.

Where the money goes — a real breakdown

Published in full in the case study. This is what $100,000 did.

They were six days away from signing a competing offer from a well-known equity lender at 13.75%, with roughly $12,000 in fees. It was the only offer they had and the clock had run out. The difference between that and what was written is not a rounding error — it is the reason to make one more phone call before you sign the first thing you are handed.

A second file, and a harder one

Private money is not always about debt. A Calgary couple with a home worth about $1,000,000 reached the end of a term with an alternative lender that would not renew them after two late payments — one partner had been off work after surgery. The mortgage matured, and the lender’s lawyers issued a foreclosure demand. That file is published in full too, including the cost: 9.49% and $31,325 of fees.

We publish that number for the same reason we publish the rest. It is a lot of money. It also bought a family the ability to sell on their own terms instead of the court’s. If you are somewhere in that sequence already — missed payments, a demand letter, a statement of claim — start on the stop foreclosure page instead of this one, because the order of operations is different.

When a private mortgage is the wrong answer

Josh Tagg turns this work down regularly, and these are the usual reasons.

• There is no exit. If nothing about your income, credit or plans changes in twelve months, a private mortgage does not fix anything — it adds $20,000 to the problem and moves the deadline. The exit is the deal. If we cannot describe it in a sentence, we should not write it.
• You have the time to do it properly. Six weeks and documentable income means a refinance or an alternative lender, at a fraction of the cost.
• A payment arrangement covers it. See the CRA section above. Cheaper than us, every time.
• The equity is not there. Below a workable combined loan-to-value, the answer is no — and a broker who tells you that in one call has saved you an appraisal fee and a week.
• It is being used to keep a lifestyle upright. A private second against a house is an appropriate tool for a solvable, dated problem. It is a poor tool for an ongoing shortfall.

If you are self-employed and the problem is that your declared income does not reflect what you actually earn, there is usually a much cheaper route than this one — see self-employed mortgages in Calgary. And if your existing lender is quoting you a large penalty to break, check what that penalty really is before assuming a second mortgage is the cheaper path around it.

Who this page is for

• You owe the CRA, the bank has declined you, and you want the balance cleared before anything lands on your title.
• Your credit is bruised — a score in the 500s or 600s — but your mortgage has never been late.
• You need money in days, not weeks, and you have equity in an Alberta home.
• Your first mortgage is fine and you do not want to break it, or the penalty to break it is punishing.
• You have been handed one expensive offer and want to know whether it is a fair one before you sign it.

Where we work

Mortgages for Less with INDI Mortgage is a Calgary brokerage and we take private and second mortgage files across Alberta — Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer, Lethbridge, Fort McMurray, Airdrie, Okotoks and the smaller centres in between. Private lenders price partly on location, so where the property is affects both the rate and whether a lender will look at it at all; we will tell you that on the first call rather than after an appraisal. This page sits alongside the rest of our mortgage services.

Common questions about private and second mortgages in Alberta

Figures on this page come from mortgage files this brokerage arranged and has published in full; names and identifying details have been changed. Every situation is different — equity, credit, qualification, timing, costs and results vary by borrower, property and lender, and are subject to change and to lender approval. Nothing here is a promise or prediction of outcome, an offer of credit, or a quote. Private mortgages carry substantially higher rates and fees than mainstream mortgages and are intended as short-term solutions only. Josh Tagg is a mortgage broker, not a lawyer or an accountant; for tax debt, insolvency or anything registered against your title, get advice from the appropriate professional as well. This page is general information, not financial, mortgage, tax or legal advice. Mortgages for Less with INDI Mortgage.