The Readiness Check

Find out in two minutes whether buying is a this-year question or a next-year one.

What this is

Most home buying guides open by asking you to commit. This one opens by asking you nine questions and then telling you the truth about where you stand.

There is no wrong answer here, and there's no version of this where you finish and we tell you not to buy a home. The point is narrower than that: buying a home is made of about six moving parts, and almost everyone starts with two or three of them already in decent shape and the rest untouched. Knowing which is which is the difference between ninety productive days and six frustrating months.

The check takes about two minutes. You don't need an account, you don't need to give us an email address, and you don't need any of your paperwork in front of you. Estimates are fine — every number you enter here gets refined properly in Week 2.

What you get at the end is three things. A starting point, because plenty of people can skip the first week or two entirely. A rough affordability band, which is a range rather than a figure. And a live count of how many homes are currently for sale in Edmonton inside that band, pulled from the same MLS® feed the rest of the site runs on.

That last one matters more than it sounds. The gap between "I don't know if I can afford anything" and "there are two hundred and fourteen of them and here they are" is the entire emotional distance of this process, and for a lot of people it closes in a single screen.

A caution on the band you'll see. It is built from ratios lenders commonly use — 39% of gross income toward housing, 44% toward all debts — applied to numbers you estimated in under two minutes. It is not a pre-approval, it isn't a promise, and no lender has seen it. Treat it as the size of the room, not the shape of the furniture.

Why Edmonton makes this realistic

Edmonton is one of the few major Canadian cities where a ninety-day timeline from first thought to keys is genuinely realistic rather than optimistic, and the reason is mostly arithmetic. Entry prices are lower than Calgary and far lower than Toronto or Vancouver, which means a down payment target that takes a decade elsewhere can take a couple of years here.

Alberta also has no provincial land transfer tax, which removes one of the largest single cash costs buyers face in most other provinces. There are still Land Titles registration fees and they aren't nothing, and Week 11 works through the full list line by line — but the number people brace for isn't there.

What it unlocks

Your answers pre-fill Week 1 and Week 2, so you won't type any of it twice.

Saving your progress is optional, and it's what makes the course resumable across devices and unlocks the personalized PDF at the end. Signing up is offered here, once, after you've seen your result — not before.

The weekly email is a separate choice with its own checkbox, and it starts unticked. You can unsubscribe from any message. We don't pass what you enter here to anyone.

The information in this course is general education, not financial, mortgage, legal, tax, insurance or real estate advice. Rules, costs and eligibility change and vary by situation. Talk to a qualified professional about your own circumstances.