Moving to the US in a Year or Two? What to Do Now

Most of what determines whether your U.S. mortgage is easy or painful is decided in the twelve months before you apply, not during the application. By the time you are writing an offer, most of the useful moves are behind you.

Here is the order they need to happen in, and why each one has the lead time it has.

Eighteen to twenty-four months out

Do not reorganise your finances yet. Do find out what your paperwork will look like.

The single most common self-inflicted problem is a Canadian who spends the year before a move making sensible Canadian decisions that quietly wreck a U.S. application. Paying yourself in dividends instead of salary. Taking a large shareholder loan. Restructuring a holdco. Selling a rental to free up cash. Every one of those can be perfectly defensible in Canada, and every one can change how a U.S. underwriter reads your file.

You do not need to avoid those moves. You need to know, before you make them, which ones require two years of history to be usable. That is a thirty-minute conversation, and it is worth more than anything else on this list.

Start the U.S. credit file. A U.S. score needs roughly six months of reported history before it exists at all, and longer to be useful. If a U.S. credit file is going to help you, the account has to be open now, not later. Be certain the card actually reports to a U.S. bureau — a U.S. dollar card from your Canadian bank does not.

Apply for an ITIN if you will need one. It takes time, it is administrative, and it is easier to do while nothing depends on it.

Twelve months out

Decide whether you are buying as a resident or a non-resident. These are different mortgage products with different down payments and different documentation. A relocation where you will hold a visa and U.S. employment is not the same file as a snowbird purchase, even if the house is identical. Answering this early stops you from collecting the wrong documents for a year.

Establish where the down payment lives and stop moving it. U.S. lenders want to see the source of your funds, commonly across sixty to ninety days of statements, and they dislike large deposits they cannot trace. Cash that has been sitting in one Canadian account for a year is simple. Cash that arrived last month from three places is a file full of explanations. If money needs to move, move it now.

Keep your Canadian credit clean and open. Do not close old cards to tidy up. Length of history is an asset, and your Canadian report is what a foreign national program will read.

Six months out

Get a written pre-assessment, not a rate quote. A rate quote tells you what a lender advertises. A pre-assessment tells you what your file actually supports: which programs you qualify for, the realistic down payment, and which documents will be the sticking point. Rates may change before you close. The structural answer is usually much more durable.

Confirm your income will still be documentable after the move. This catches people. If you are moving from Canadian employment to U.S. employment, there is a window where you have left one and not yet established the other, and a lender may be able to use neither. If you are self-employed and your business is following you across the border, that window can be long. It is manageable when you plan for it and ugly when you discover it in underwriting.

Currency. If your down payment is in Canadian dollars and the purchase is in U.S. dollars, you are carrying exchange rate risk on the whole amount until you convert. There are ways to stage that. This is a conversation with a foreign exchange provider, not something to leave to the closing week.

Three months out

Assemble the file before you need it. Depending on the program, be ready with up to two years of tax returns, notices of assessment, T4 or T4A slips, sixty to ninety days of bank statements, photo identification, and for the self-employed, business financial statements. Complete beats recent. A file that arrives whole moves; a file that arrives in pieces sits.

Open the U.S. bank account if you do not have one. You will need somewhere for the mortgage payment to come from after closing.

Understand the day count. How long you spend in the United States has tax consequences that are separate from your mortgage, and the two interact. Ask a cross-border accountant before you commit to a pattern, not after.

At offer

By this point the mortgage should be the least interesting part of the transaction. If it is not, something upstream was skipped.

The one thing worth doing first

Of everything above, the highest-value item is the earliest and least obvious: find out which of your normal Canadian financial decisions carry a two-year shadow in a U.S. underwriting file, before you make them.

Everything else on this list can be recovered from. That one cannot, because you cannot retroactively create history you did not build.

David H. Nataf is personally licensed in Florida (NMLS #2613311) and Quebec (AMF #3001986744). U.S. files are placed through Orbis Mortgage, NMLS #2583431. For a purchase in a state where he is not personally licensed, he runs the Canadian side of the file, the cross-border structuring and the lender matching, coordinated with an originator licensed in that state. That is one file with one person accountable for it, not a referral handed to a stranger.

This page is for information. Program terms, rates and requirements vary by lender and change without notice. Nothing here is tax or immigration advice.