Plans For A National Mortgage Bank

The Dutch government is making plans to create a national mortgage bank. In short, the idea is that Dutch retirement funds will invest in this bank and thus invest in The Netherlands. The government and the retirement funds are now negotiating the terms. The retirement funds wants the Dutch government to be responsible for a certain amount of risk. Ah…investing the “safe” way.

The government hopes to relieve a lot of Dutch banks from their huge mortgage pressure, or whatever.

Sound very promising. The banks will be happy, the retirement funds will be happy and the Dutch government will be happy. I just hope this turns out beneficial for the Dutch population.

Let’s wait and see…

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

I Didn’t Know That Many People Have Trouble Paying Their Mortgage

Wow. I. Had. No. Idea.

About 80.000 households in The Netherlands are more than 3 months behind on their mortgage payments. There are roughly about 7,5 million households in The Netherlands. That’s more than 1%. Shocking!

In extreme cases people commit suicide because they can’t cover their mortgage expenses anymore. I do think banks are to blame. They lent people ridiculously high mortgages while their incomes didn’t match that amount. The whole Dutch situation is so sad. The housing bubble which the banks helped create burst and guess who’s paying the price double?

On the other hand, there are many spendypants out there who just bought everything they “needed” and now realize that they have overspent and will risk losing it all. I do not feel sorry for those people.

Jeez, just the thought of losing your house. The bank knocking on your door and putting your house up for foreclosure. Making extra mortgage payments would be like talking gibberish to them. They can’t even afford the principal.

Again, never take out a mortgage that requires two full-time salaries. Never. Ever. That’s one lesson I’ll teach the kid.

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

They’ll Make The Right Decision…Yes They Will!

A couple of weeks from now our government will present the plans for 2014. We know they’ll cut the budget with 6 billion. My husband and myself already know that we’re going to get screwed somehow. But let’s keep things positive. They also think the total amount of outstanding mortgage debt is way too high and they’re thinking of plans to make people pay things off. No, not the logical way. That would be too easy. They will allow parents to give their kids up to €100.000 tax free in order to pay off part of their mortgage or in order to rebuild part of their homes.

If, theoretically, either of our parents would want to donate that amount of money to us…it would be useless. I have tried to explain it before and I’ll mention it again: we’re stuck with a weird type of mortgage that only allows you to pay off things within a certain bandwidth. So even if they would be willing to give us the money (which I would find a totally ridiculous thing for them to do, we can take care of ourselves thank you very much but how do say that nicely?) we wouldn’t be able to pay off a huge chunk of our house with it.

Now, I am hoping that they’ll get rid of these ridiculous tax rules that come with our type of mortgage. If they’ll do that, you know what we’re going to do…right?!

Oh……I am wishing away here! If only…. Well, we’ll know in three weeks.

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

At Least The Husband Still Has Career Opportunities

I’m 32 and for now my career is over, finished, done with. Oh well, maybe it’s a good thing now that I’m pregnant. It gives me piece of mind to know that this is it for now. I can focus on this motherhood thing.

The husband came home the other day and mentioned that he was invited for a course which will occupy him for a day per week during a whole year. After completing this course he’ll be able to do what his superior does. His superior was also the one who mentioned this course to him and really urges him to enroll. My husband still has many career opportunities, yay! My hubby is a super smart software architect and he’ll become an even smarter system architect after completing this course. Hope the kid has his genes!

I guess I’ll go now and start working on that laundry 😉 😉 😉

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

We Made Our First Baby Purchase! Second-Hand Of course :-)

My colleague immediately asked me whether I’d be interested in a crib and a dresser. She has two kids and bought both of them new stuff. The youngest one is going to use the eldest one’s stuff a couple of months from now. So the crib and dresser were used for one kid for about a year and a half and it’s decent quality. It’s the “Merel” series by a brand called Bopita (I seriously haven’t heard of this before, guess I have a lot to learn?). We’ll be buying a crib, dresser and some shelving for €200. We absolutely adore the design. She’ll also throw in some other stuff which we’ll need when the kid’s very tiny.

This is of what it looks like (excluding the closet on the left):

We’ll get the stuff a couple of months from now as she’s still using it for her little one.

I’m over the moon with this purchase! And I believe we got a good deal. Do you think so too?

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

Festival Fun

What a wonder festival that was! I saw lots of theatre, because there were chairs in that tent. I still feel tired all the time. Turns out there were some great shows. I also laid on the grass a lot, just listening to music. I very much enjoyed this festival.

I already had a quick peek at our bank account. The fact that I didn’t drink any alcoholic beverages (I don’t drink too much anyway) and stuck to free water did wonders for our expenses. The husband didn’t drink too much either. However, food was ridiculously expensive…that’s the case at all these festivals. When we’re at a festival we talk about how much tokens (or equivalent in beers) something costs. You need to buy these tokens in order to buy anything at a festival. One token is €2.60. So a small beer is one token and a large one is one and a half. A pancake is 3 tokens. When you say it like that, it doesn’t hurt that much. Thinking about it now we paid €7.80 for a take away pancake…ouch!

Oh well, we knew this up front and we love going to festivals. We go to a music festival during Easter and this one (LowLands) every year. We think it’s totally worth the money, because we enjoy the experience so much.

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

First Part Of Our Frugal Holiday

As you might have noticed I’ve been away for a couple of days. The husband and myself went to this organised hike with a couple of friends. We camped in the garden of one of our friends’ parents. We do this every year. Instead of a camping, we call it a “glamping” since it’s so glamorous. The “grandma” makes us tea and coffee and what not all day. We also prepared our own food in her kitchen, but she insisted she’d take care of most of it. This glamping was free, fun and frugal. Loved it!

Now we’re off to a holiday home on the coast which belongs to acquaintances and we’re not allowed to pay for it even if we wanted to.

After that, we’ll go to LowLands which is a very cool music festival here in The Netherlands. You can’t bring your own food and drinks along, so this one’s going to be pricey. We go to this festival ever year and we thoroughly enjoy it. No need to pinch pennies during those couple of days! However, we are bringing our camelbaks to make sure we drink enough water. So, a little bit of frugality there.

I’m loving our frugal holiday!

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

The Mortgage Story

This week the husband and I…no actually all credits go to the husband…calculated different scenarios for our mortgage. We paid off the interest-only part of our mortgage, yay! Now, we’re stuck with the savings mortgage which comes with a lot of weird tax rules. There’s this bandwidth we need to abide by, or else we lose all our tax breaks. We’d have to pay 52% income tax on all interest received if we start paying that thing off. That could amount to tens of thousands of euros. The husband calculated different scenarios and the conclusion is that we should stick with the mortgage as it is. It’s now set at 26 years, so that’s another 23 years because we’re 3 years into it. However, 7 years from now we’ll have to negotiate a new interest rate. At that point in time we could (and will) make sure that we can lower the amount of years to 20 plus 1 month in total (we won’t be in trouble if we abide by the 20 year rule). Ugh…another 17 years of paying a mortgage.

This type of mortgage was founded in 2008 and five years later these type of mortgages can’t even be offered anymore. It’s difficult to explain, you’d have to really know our weird system. Anyways, this type of mortgage and the bandwidth are a burden for our government as well. They’re investigating getting rid of this bandwith. I can’t see any disadvantages for our government and neither can the researchers who performed an impact assessment, so I hope the politicians come through. In that case, we’ll start paying off or throwing lots of money into the savings bit as much as we can. Depends on whether they’ll think of some extra limitations. I really hope that they’ll decide to get rid of this bandwidth within the next year or so. Until then…we’re ‘stashing (saving and index investing)!

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

A New Cooperative Dutch Bank

The Dutch are getting more and more fed up with the bank system. A couple of people now started a bank coop. They’re now recruiting new members. I’ve actually signed up and paid €20. In Belgium the same type of organisation managed to gather over 40.000 members within a couple of months. The idea is that the bankers don’t get ridiculous bonuses and most profits are shared amongst members. Me like!

Would you sign up for something like this?

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

Colourful Weekend

This Friday we headed for our beautiful capital Amsterdam. We stayed the night with a friend who owns an apartment at the Prinsengracht which is down town. A hotel room in this area will easily go for around €100 a night. We always buy her a gift whenever we stay with her. Something she really likes. We didn’t spend a lot of time with her, we also met up with other friends. I’d feel very uncomfortable if we didn’t compensate her in some way for her efforts. She always gives up her own bed for us and stays in the spare bedroom herself. She insists. And she makes us breakfast plus we can eat whatever we want.

To make a long story short, she really wanted a rainbow flag. So Saturday morning we went out on our bikes and got one. Yeah, we went there by train (2 for 1 deal!) and we rented bikes with our special bike rental card. We can rent bikes on any Dutch railway station with that card for about €2.50 a day, I think. Anyway, getting off topic here. We celebrated Gay Pride yesterday and it was so much fun. On the first Saturday of August there’s this canal boat parade in Amsterdam with lots of colourful people in order to promote gay awareness. Even the military, police and famous soccer players each decorate a boat and have people dancing on them.

Here’s a cool picture (there were about 80 different boats):

Personally, I seriously can’t understand why people feel offended or outraged about gay people in this world. And I sure as hell don’t understand why one would want to oppose gay marriage. If only one looks at the financial aspect of it. In a country where gay people are not allowed to get married they’ll have so many financial disadvantages compared to straight people when it comes to income tax, insurance and inheritance. It’s pure discrimination when gay people have to pay more taxes when they inherit from their partner just because they weren’t able to get married.

I am very proud to be Dutch and the fact that our country was one of the first that allowed gay marriage.

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser