It is expected that more than two million Canadians will renew their mortgage loans over the next year and a half. This prompted CTV News to ask more than 50 mortgage brokers across Canada how to secure the best mortgage deal. Here’s what we found.

One mother in Ontario said her mortgage payments are about to practically double, which means more than $2,000 extra a month if interest rates do not drop on Wednesday - and it’s "harder than anything" she has ever faced.

Shona Wood, a 40-year-old mother of eight, told CTV: "You’re asking $2,100 to be pulled from thin air while still providing for all my children's basic needs."

After renting a home in Oro-Medonte for ten years, the family of ten purchased the five-bedroom house two hours north of Toronto for $800,000 in 2021. At that time, they secured a fixed interest rate of 3.2 percent for three years.

Like many Canadians, Wood managed to lock in historically low interest rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. But at the end of the month, her mortgage will be up for renewal, meaning she will be watching the Bank of Canada’s interest rate announcement on Wednesday like a hawk.

She said the bank offered her a renewal rate of 7.1 percent, which would translate to a jump from $3,000 to $5,100 a month to cover mortgage payments, adding, "It makes you sick, we worked hard to buy this home."

Her husband has increased his workload from 50 to 70 hours per week. Anticipating the upcoming interest rate announcement, Wood said she and her husband have considered leaving the province, selling their home, and refinancing.

She said, "I pray this is a drop and not another hike," referring to the Bank of Canada’s decision to keep the key interest rate steady at five percent in April.

She added, "I just keep praying and praying, and I ask God to let it drop even by 0.25 percent. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but when you look at the large mortgages people have, it makes a difference of a few hundred dollars."

In a cottage in Cameron, north of Lindsay, Ontario, Heather Wetherell and her husband have spent nine years at a fixed rate of 10 years.

Wetherell admitted that the current interest rate of 3.06 percent won't happen again, but she hopes for a decrease in rates - "even a small dip would help," she said.

Much has changed in the life of the 65-year-old man over the past decade. He retired as a nurse last November, and his salary as a commercial insurance broker has recently been cut in half while he has been home undergoing dialysis in anticipation of a kidney transplant.

Wetherell said, "It’s stressful." "And then when you have financial problems on top of that, it’s overwhelming."

The anxiety surrounding mortgage payments seems widespread. Like Wood and Wetherell, about a quarter of participants in a Canadian mortgage and housing survey expressed concern about their ability to make their monthly mortgage payments.

Of the fifty mortgage brokers CTV News contacted for advice, the five based in Toronto unanimously agreed that fixed-rate mortgages are the safest route.

Marlon Valencia, a mortgage broker in Toronto, said the predictability of a fixed rate outweighs the likelihood of variable rates dropping. "Only when a client can accept the risk and has a strong fallback do I recommend a variable term."

However, Valencia said this doesn’t mean that an individual with a variable mortgage should get out of it - unless they are completely unable to afford their monthly payments.

Valencia explained that many variable rates allow you to lock in your rate for free as long as you extend your term. "It would be a shame to have them fix it near the end of a high-rate environment. If they can, I would wait."

For Wood, these are the questions that keep her awake at night, and she wakes up in the morning with those questions still on her mind.

She said, "You contemplate it 24 hours a day, on top of everything else happening."

"There’s no dining out. You can’t send your kids to camp because you have this huge mortgage increase weighing us down, and the children are the ones suffering.