Cian Carolan

And what do I do?

And so you bring them on a journey as to here are some options that we can do.

But I think like there is no magic number because you put two people in front of me with the same salary and the same mortgage repayment, the same number of children and childcare costs.

The biggest variable of all is lifestyle expenditure.

That's what separates how one household survives to the next.

So probably I would think max 35% of your take-home pay going out on mortgage and mortgage-related insurances.

Lenders will probably allow you to do a little bit more, but...

you know, I'm putting my financial planner hat on and I'm saying, well, look, there's a lot more to life and planning financially for the future than your mortgage and being debt free.

So let's keep some flexibility to do and plan for other things.

We're all sitting and waiting for ECB to meet in June.

And there's an expectation that rates will go up by a quarter of a percent in June.

And there's a further expectation of another rate increase of 0.25 later in the year.

And that's not to scaremonger people, but the markets have priced in an assumption that rates will go up by half a percent before the end of this year.

Yeah, there's loads of factors playing into this.

But I suppose one of the key numbers is inflation.

And it's something that ECB have a responsibility and a very big motivation to keep in check.

And I think Irish inflation is running at 3.6% at the minute.

I think European inflation is maybe closer to 3%.

it's higher than they would like it to be.

They might tweak rates just to curb that kind of inflationary growth at the minute.