If you are lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) to have a mortgage, a large chunk of your monthly income is probably being gobbled up by it, preventing you from living the life you want while funding a bank’s speculation game.
The word mortgage literally means ‘death pledge’, and such device is designed to keep people in hock to a financial institution for the best part of their lives.
Mortgages are big business for these institutions, and in Ireland, they make an extra buck or two by keeping interest rates artificially higher than the average across the Euro zone.
Here, you can expect to pay an average of 3.5% variable rate, whereas in most of Europe, it stands at 1.83%, on average.
Financial gurus here say that the reason for such disparity is the higher funding costs in Ireland, and that the volatility of the Irish market makes lending a much riskier proposition.
Life Mirror 