When your life is no longer affordable, what can you do?

With credit card balances at all time-highs, and the debt facing Canadian households reaching levels not seen in any other G7 country, people are looking for solutions, and for some giving up on a ballooning mortgage is the answer.

"I downsized and moved into an apartment and it's the best thing I've ever done for myself," education worker Deborah Diebel of Wiarton, Ont., said on CBC Radio's noon hour call-in program, Ontario Today. 

"I'm happier and I have fewer expenses."

Diebel bought her home in 2008 and on paper she should have been able to afford it, she said. But the budget to maintain a three-bedroom home from the 1880s was more than Diebel could handle.

For many years, she found solutions: Diebel rented out rooms in her home, couch-surfed when she listed the house on Airbnb, and traded in her car for a smaller, more affordable vehicle.

But after crunching the numbers and talking with a financial planner, it still wasn't enough.

"I looked at the list of everything I would need to do to maintain the house and just realized if I sold, that whole list just disappeared," she said.

"Home ownership is not necessarily all it's cracked up to be and it's not for everybody."

Her story is not unique.

"The level of household debt is more than the size of the economy," said Aled ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).

That's unprecedented in recent Canadian history, he said.

Much of that debt is tied up in ballooning mortgages, thanks to growing interest rates.

And with 100,000 mortgages coming up for renewal in Canada every month, the number of people facing loans they can no longer afford is likely to rise. 

"We're getting more and more concerned about the refinancing risk in 2024, 2025," said ab Iorwerth, referring to the number of people who bought homes during the pandemic when interest rates were still relatively low.