The Picard ManeuverWhat could go wrong?
stormdahlFor me personally I’d like a 50-60 square meter apartment for no more than 2x my annual income. And I’d like to be able to get a loan with a monthly down payment equal to whatever I’ve been paying in rent for the last couple of years.
I can pay 12500 NOK a month in rent, but for some reason the bank can’t trust me to pay the same amount if I were to buy an apartment? Fuck that.
Banks used to trust people and that has led to GFC. So most governments now have legal frameworks to ensure that banks don’t trust you anymore. I don’t think you want another GFC.
Surely there can be a middle ground.
I hate that I’ve been paying close to 150k NOK a year in rent for the last ten years but for some reason I can’t be trusted with a loan unless I make a lot more and save up something like 300k.
Except for the fact that I have a place to live it feels like I’m throwing money out the window.
I don’t know what the situation is in your country, but here’s an example from the UK.
Imagine you bought a £500k house in London just after the pandemic. The mortgage rates were around 1.2-1.3%. You could afford monthly payments at the time, everything looked cool. Now a couple years later the war in Ukraine starts, economy tanks and interest rates go over 7%. Now your monthly payments become 3-4x higher and you’re fucked. You lose your house, become homeless and you still owe half a mil. The end.
Interesting to see the difference. In the US it’s most common for mortgages to be “fixed rate” and remain the same for the entire loan period. Downside is a higher base percentage, we got down to about 2.6-2.7% in the same time period. Upside is that your payment will never go up.
Yeah, that’s the difference. But in general British mortgages are much cheaper. That also leads to a situation, that people invest free money instead of over paying their mortgages. I’m still on 1.32% for example, while even my basic savings account pays me 4.5%.