Dear Swedish Housing Market: I HATE YOU!

So we are just your average Svenmerican family, with 2 kids, a pretty decent income, a good sized nest egg in a BSCHCOL area in Sweden. And we want a house. But we are not willing to risk our entire financial future on the biggest purchase of our lives.

Basically we are fucked.

I have vented about the Swedish housing market before. I know. But it really pisses me off that those of us who have really tried to make smart financial decisions are the ones who are left out in the cold, and those who are willing to play financial roulette are the ones who have nice homes.

The price of homes in Sweden has doubled in the last ten years. DOUBLED where we live. NO ONE is amortizing their homes. A recent call for home owners to require amortization to 75% of home value was rejected by major Swedish politicians. The conservative ones.

Everyone only looks at the monthly cost � which is interest and fees. No one actually talks about the fact that you are borrowing half a million dollars and then NEVER paying it back.

And the houses? Does no one in Sweden have more than 2 children and work from home? Yay for open plan houses, but all of the new houses in our area have a maximum of 3 bedrooms and some only have one large open area that is supposed to be livingroom/dining area/play area � and these houses start at 600,000 dollars. We need an office/guest room and would love to have 2 kind of open areas � one for kids.

The housing market is starting to slow down a little bit. But it is just depressing. Of course we can wait. But if we are going to do this house buying thing, I would like to do it while the kids are little � so we can enjoy a yard.

And of course the bank is ready to throw money at us. Because who wouldn�t throw money at people they hope will pay interest for the next 30 years on a 500,000 dollar loan. They are combing in the money.

This housing model cannot be sustainable. I do not get it. But then again, I am not an economist.

I don�t want the bottom to go out of this for the sake of the Swedish economy, but when people with our income and with decent money to spend don�t feel like they can afford a house � who is left to buy up all these houses?