Daft Property - Irish Property News

ECB interest rate hike to affect over 75% of Irish homeowners... THE EUROPEAN Central Bank (ECB) raised its main lending rate by a quarter of a point to 1.25 per cent yesterday in a move that will add about €40 on to the monthly repayments of a person with a €300,000 tracker mortgage. The announcement marks the first time in more than two years that tracker mortgage holders will feel the pinch of rising interest rates and it is expected to be the first of at least three rate increases over the next 12 months. It will see the cost of mortgages climb for more than three-quarters of Irish homeowners. For every €100,000 owed on a 30-year tracker mortgage of 1.5 per cent plus the ECB rate, a quarter point increase adds about €13 on to the monthly repayments. As a result of the ECB announcement, a person with a €300,000 tracker will see their monthly repayments rise by about €480 annually while someone with a €400,000 mortgage will have to pay a further €52.50 monthly, or €630 each y

Struggle to pay bills is about to get much worse... With a swathe of EU interest rate hikes coming our way, mortgages will shoot up by thousands of euro a year: THE President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Jean-Claude Trichet, shocked us all last week when he suggested that the next ECB rate hike could be as early as this April. There are already 60,000 homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages. With a raft of European interest rate hikes on the cards, many of them will find it even harder to pay their mortgage in a few weeks' time -- and tens of thousands more homeowners will share their fate. We all knew that the ECB interest rate -- which influences the amount of interest you pay on your mortgage -- was on its way up. Yet surging oil prices and a pick-up in eurozone inflation mean this rate hike will now happen a lot sooner than we ever expected. Some economists believe the ECB rate could increase four times this year. As the ECB rate has been at an all-time