10:28
The country Sweden is depressing – dark, temperature, rain and so on for a large part of the year.
We solved that with big warm bright comfortable houses – it was nice indoors.
Now it is starting to slowly erode and sitting in 15 degrees indoors in semi-darkness half the year can probably make anyone suicidal?
Then Swedes are probably quite highly indebted compared to many countries, in the UK they had 30-year straight amortization and in the USA the interest rate does not change after the loan is taken so you stay put no matter how the interest rate changes. Many other countries have similar systems so that over two years you can get 3-4 times more expensive interest costs definitely does not apply everywhere.
10:23
A lot is coming now, 3-4 times the interest cost over a few years, 5-6 times higher electricity prices over a few years, rising unemployment and severe inflation.
The only thing we might avoid during this term is higher taxes and the property tax, and we should be very grateful for that.
It might be appropriate to tone down the thread schadenfreude a bit that sometimes surfaces. There are probably many who are starting to end up in a tough financial situation who read the blog for tips and triumphant – “you only have yourselves to blame” just ends up kicking those who are already down. We talk a lot about good behavior in the UA thread and that we should not engage in mocking disabilities, it feels like similar should apply in the finance threads.
Here we are fully occupied with the electricity price but Ingves hits with a 0.75% increase on already high interest rates at 4.5%, so my interest cost for the previous home would have gone up 3.5 times in a couple of years – I certainly hadn’t budgeted for that and now it turned out that we moved instead.