$1,000 a Month for Nothing. Your House Can Fix That.

Short answer: often yes, if you have the equity. Better question: should you. That one depends on numbers most people never sit down and add up.

Here is the thing about consumer debt. It is not the balance that hurts you. It is the interest rate attached to it.

The standard purchase rate on most Canadian credit cards sits at 19.99 or 20.99 percent. Store cards run higher. Meanwhile the Bank of Canada held its policy rate at 2.25 percent on September 2, 2026, and bank prime is sitting at 4.45 percent. Mortgage money and credit card money are two completely different animals right now.

Run the arithmetic. Sixty thousand dollars of card debt at 20 percent costs roughly a thousand dollars a month in interest alone. Not principal. Interest. That is a thousand dollars a month that buys you nothing and reduces nothing.

How rolling debt into your mortgage actually works

You refinance. The new mortgage pays out the old mortgage plus the consumer debt, and you are left with one payment instead of six.

On an owner-occupied home in Alberta you can generally refinance up to 80 percent of the property value. So if the house appraises at $600,000 and you owe $380,000, there is room to work with - $100,000 of it, in that example, before you hit the 80 percent ceiling.

What it costs - the part nobody puts in the ad

• The penalty. If you break mid-term, you pay a prepayment charge. On a fixed mortgage that can be an interest rate differential, and it can be ugly. On a variable it is usually three months interest.
• Legal and appraisal. Budget for both. Some lenders cover them on a switch, most do not on a refinance.
• The amortization trap. This is the big one. Take $60,000 of card debt and stretch it over 25 years and you will pay less every month while paying more in total. That is a worse outcome dressed up as relief.

Look - consolidation only wins if you do two things. Keep your total payment roughly where it was and let the savings kill the principal. And do not run the cards back up. I have watched both of those go sideways, and I would rather tell you now than sign you up for the sequel.

Your renewal is the cheap door

Here is what most people miss. If your renewal is inside 120 days, you can usually restructure with no prepayment penalty at all, because the term is ending anyway. Same equity, same result, none of the breakage cost.

That makes your renewal date the single most valuable date on your calendar. It is the one moment where changing lenders, pulling equity out, or consolidating debt costs you almost nothing to do. Miss it, sign the letter the bank mailed you, and the door closes for another five years.

If you are not sure when your term ends, dig out the mortgage statement before you do anything else. Then read how Alberta mortgage renewals work so you know what you are walking into.

What the numbers look like across the country

You are not an outlier. Equifax Canada reported total consumer debt at $2.68 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, with non-mortgage debt at $712.2 billion, up 4.8 percent. A separate Equifax survey in August 2026 found one in four Canadians expect to manage only the minimum payment on their credit cards.

Minimum payments are the trap. On a card at 20 percent, the minimum is engineered to keep you paying for a decade or more.

The move this month

Pull three numbers: what you owe on the house, what the house is worth, and the total of every consumer balance with its rate beside it. Ten minutes at the kitchen table.

Then run it through the debt consolidation calculator. If the gap is real, call me and we will look at whether your renewal date makes it cheaper to wait a few weeks.

Shawn Selanders, Mortgage Broker with Mortgage Architects, serving High River, Okotoks, Calgary, Foothills County and Southern Alberta since 1999, with access to 30+ lenders. Figures in this article are illustrations only and are not an offer of credit. Rates and lender policies change without notice. All lending O.A.C. E.&O.E. Sources: Bank of Canada policy rate announcement September 2, 2026; Equifax Canada Market Pulse, August 24 and August 6, 2026.