If two working professionals can qualify for 1 million mortgage with no CHMC that means +200,000 K down payment minimum + 150-200k year combined income.
The chances are they are no idiots, some of them living pay cheque to pay cheque plossible but majority of them doing that? Highly unlikely
Perfect example.
Two working professionals, each making $100k / year - pretty much exactly where our government punishes those who do a little better than average. They would pay about 25% in income takes. Combined take home pay is $150k, or about $12,500 / month. Seems like a lot?
With their mortgage, property taxes, house maintenance, utility bills, insurance, etc. their housing costs are probably approaching $6k / month. Car payments , gas and insurance are $1k month.
That leaves them about $150 / day (or $75 each) to pay for all their food, housing supplies, entertainment, lunches (these are working professionals), retirement savings, clothes, haircuts, vacations, etc. That's not even considering if they have children.
Don't know the actual stats, but I wouldn't be surprised if more of these heavily indebted working professionals are living paycheck to paycheck than we might thing.
I think your numbers might be over estimated, I'm not saying there aren't people in that situation, but I just took a quick look at my own properties using the exact figures for Maintenance, taxes, utilities, etc. and ran a couple mortgage scenarios using a mortgage calculator from CIBC and we can see where this would actually be for monthly costs
House in East Van - 1M Mortgage - Monthly Housing Expenses $5860 , less 2 Mortgage Helper suites $2000 total per month, leaves Monthly housing at $3860
Large Condo Downtown - 800 k Mortgage - Monthly Housing Expenses $4650
Medium Condo Downtown - 500k Mortgage - Monthly Housing expenses $3050
So lets say that the company also provides a RRSP/ Pension matching program, plus an employee stock plan, plus a 15% annual bonus, for ease of math will say that is on top of the 100k salary.
Using the worst case example, living in a large downtown condo, lets call it 6k all-in for car plus housing, Their retirement savings is taken care, TFSA can get maxed out via the stock plan and they have over 20k in after-tax bonus money (perhaps for vacations??), plus 6.5k per month to live-on (or approx $215 per day)
Now lets talk about someone with a much lower mortgage, if someone was able to trade-up to that condo over time, and say had a 300k mortgage left on their condo, the total housing expenses would only be $2700 plus $1300 in car expenses, which leaves them 8.5k per month to play with...I think that's more than enough to live pay cheque to pay cheque.