The Catalan Finance Institute (ICF), the public bank of the Generalitat, has granted to date 846 loans to young people aged 18 to 35 to obtain the down payment for an apartment. The average granted is 36,332 euros and an average housing price of 189,908 euros with an average age of beneficiaries of 29.4 years, according to data presented by the Secretary General of Economy and President of the ICF's governing board, Juli Fernández, and the entity's CEO, Vanessa Servera.

The armed conflict in the Middle East also has financial repercussions. The Euribor, the benchmark for variable-rate mortgages, registered its largest daily increase in almost 20 years on Tuesday. This one-year indicator climbed to 2.552%, an increase of 0.185 percentage points. Normally, this benchmark fluctuates by only a few thousandths of a point daily, but this time it experienced a 7.8% rise in a single day.

We usually see debt as something negative, and having loans can keep us up at night. For this reason, many people decide to pay off their loans early to get "debt-free." But is it always worthwhile to do so? In our country, most loans use the French amortization system. This means that each payment covers a portion of the principal and a portion of the interest. Contrary to what many believe, the interest isn't always the same amount: it's calculated based on the outstanding balance. Thus, at the beginning of the loan, we pay significantly more interest than at the end. For example, on a €50,000 loan to be repaid over 60 months with an APR of 5%, the monthly payments would be €941. In the first payment, we would repay €737 of the principal and €203 of interest. However, in the final payment, we would repay €937 of the loan, and only €4 would be interest. Therefore, in the French system, interest rates decrease as the loan term progresses. This means that it's usually not advantageous to pay off a loan towards the end of its life, since most of the interest has already been paid, and therefore, we could say that the remaining money is "almost free."

After Malta, Spain has the cheapest mortgages in the eurozone. This is one of the factors contributing to the constant rise in housing prices, as supply is growing at a much slower pace than demand. Comparing the average interest rate for home purchases in August, the latest published figure for Spain is 2.69%, well below the eurozone average of 3.31% and the rates in countries like Germany (3.71%), France (3.01%), and Italy (3.28%). Demand for home loans is growing rapidly, according to the latest Bank of Spain survey for the second quarter.

September ends with the second consecutive increase in the Euribor and the third of the year (the other was in January), but that won't mean that variable-rate mortgages, those that are indexed, will become more expensive. The one-year daily Euribor, the indicator used by most variable-rate home loans, stood at 2.193% this Tuesday, bringing the average for the month to 2.172%, higher than August's (2.114%).

The one-year Euribor, the main benchmark for variable-rate mortgages, registered its first increase since January in August, closing at an average of 2.114%, compared to 2.079% in July. However, variable-rate loans for home purchases will continue to decline, as this benchmark is still below what it was a year ago (3.166%). With this trend, with this Friday's index at 2.119%, it is expected that the high rate of mortgage granting, which reached its highest level in fifteen years, will continue.

The one-year Euribor, the benchmark for variable-rate mortgages, closed May at an average of 2.081%, compared to 2.143% in April. It thus falls to the level of August 2022, just months after emerging from the negative territory it had held for six years. The fall in this index, which could continue to fall below 2% by the end of the year, according to expert estimates, has the positive effect of lowering the payments for those linked to it and also the interest rate at which new loans are offered. The most immediate effect is that a typical 25-year mortgage of €156,698 (the one collected by the National Statistics Institute for March) with a spread of the Euribor plus one percentage point, will go from having a monthly payment of €887.07 to €749.70, a reduction of €1,648.44.