I think 30-year fixed mortgages are somewhat of an American phenomenon (perhaps due to the luxury of having the global reserve currency). They are not generally available in Canada or UK, where 5-year fixed rates are the norm.
Years ago my dad took an ARM at 18% because the anti-usury laws limited the maximum it could go to 20% and it turned out to drop each adjustment period after that (80s wheeee)
What does this mean? Are there usually early repayment penalties for home mortgages in Germany, or is it simply not allowed?
In the US, I have never read about not being able to pay or a penalty for paying the entire mortgage at anytime.
And yes, the prepay penalty is generally based on the interest they would lose or a few month's interest, whichever is better for the bank at the time of payment.
But also note that if you paid the extra for a 10-year, Canadian federal law says you can prepay 100% at any time after 5 years with no penalty (or virtually no penalty?). Which is part of why longer-term mortgages are markedly more expensive.
https://www.loan.com/home-loans/how-non-recourse-loan-laws-v...
My parents (we're all American) were always very careful to check that early repayment didn't come with a penalty, on mortgages and all other loans, so I assume it used to be a thing. I've always asked (following their example) and not once had the answer be "yes, there's an early-repayment fee" so maybe it's a whole lot less common than it used to be.
Our 80/20 loan back in the countrywide heyday had a prepayment penalty on the 20 which also had a balloon. We structured our refinance to avoid the penalty.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/financial-stability/fsr/focus/...
"The prevalence and handling of prepayment risk differs in two respects between Europe and the US. First, while in the US prepayment costs may be priced into the interest rate, in many European countries lump-sum prepayment penalties are induced by statutory requirements. Often banks impose charges on homeowners for early repayment. These fees force households to bear part of the prepayment risk and, if the fees are sufficiently high, may deter homeowners from prepayment, thereby nullifying the prepayment risk faced by banks. An exception to this is the Danish mortgage market, where long-term fixed-rate mortgage loans with an embedded option of a penalty-free prepayment are typically offered, as in the US."
Personally I take advantage of it and think it's not necessarily a bad thing, but wish it was more direct about what it's trying to do.
The long term fixed rate mortgage is where no wealth gets redistributed today, but rather from future taxpayers or users of the currency.
Secondary step would be to make landlord-ing less attractive by giving tenants a lot of rights, naking them hard to evict, thank kind of thing.
This would make houses less atractive as an investment asset.
Lastly you could increase property taxes, again driving down atteactivenes of hiuses to investment.
Beinging down price of houses is easy. The question is what do you do with all the people who bought a house for 500k and now its worth 250k and they are stuck
For example,
https://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/
Reports 30 year fixed is about 7.32% and 5 year ARM is about 6.75%. A 10 year would be somewhere between that, but if I was choosing with less than a 52 basis point difference, I would go with 30 year fixed due to less downside risk of my mortgage blowing up.
At 30 year mortgages of 2% to 4%, no brainer to just go with 30 year even though you might pay a $1k more in interest every year. But you might not, and you definitely will not pay more than a $1k extra in interest since it is locked in.
If the 10/1 ARM was 5% and 30 year was 7%+, I would think about the 10/1 ARM.
Part of the problem for communities starts when not all participants live in the community - if the grocers and workers and police are “imports” from the suburbs or other areas you start to get divergent goals and WGASA starts to take hold.