Photo: RIA Novosti
I'm 23 and have a mortgage.
They say it's curable. You just need to think positively and repeat to yourself every evening that very soon these 21.6 squares in the Moscow district with the poetic name of Lyublino will become mine. Just another six years, and I will take a happy look at my Moscow, looking out the window of my studio on the 21st floor of a multi-colored new building, which has confidently grown on the site of the former Lublin irrigation fields, where city sewage has been cleaned since the end of the 19th century. On this beautiful day, I will open the window wide open and finally breathe in the charm of this historic place.
In the meantime, I have a mortgage — and the apartment in which I live is not mine yet, but is pledged to the bank.
More precisely, the mortgage is not with me, but with my whole family — my mother, father and grandmother, who live in the city of Abdulino, Orenburg Region, a thousand kilometers from Moscow.
This is our common pain and joy, the subject of endless conversations, a reason for hopes, worries and resentments.
Mortgage is our everything.
In high school, for me, as for many of my peers, «mortgage» was just a terrible word from memes about how people in Russia are programmed to live equally unhappy lives. “A mortgage is a symbol of death, chronologically it is somewhere between serving in the army and paying alimony after a divorce from an unloved wife, this is a stone that Russians for some reason hang around their necks for fifteen years,” I thought then. After school, I entered the Faculty of Journalism in Moscow, moved from Abdulino to a hostel on the outskirts of the capital, went for an internship, and then to work at Novaya — and did not notice how reality had come. In the middle of my third, penultimate year, sitting on a creaky spring bed in my dorm room, I suddenly realized that I would soon graduate from the university and I would have nowhere to live. I saw two ways out: rent a room for twenty thousand in some Teply Stan (the State Department then, at the beginning of 2019, was reluctant to help Russian liberals, and I could not afford more than a room) or — oh, horror — take a mortgage .
On one of my visits to Abdulino in February 2019, I shared my discovery with my parents. Gathered a family council. I explained that I would stay in Moscow, so I need to take out a mortgage, it's scary, but there is no better way out. We had never even discussed the possibility of buying an apartment in Moscow before — it seemed like something beyond fantasy. Therefore, at first, the parents were perplexed for a long time (“An apartment in Moscow? This is bondage for 30 years. And if they fire you tomorrow? And how can ordinary people afford an apartment in Moscow?”), But then they promised to help: it’s better to pay for your apartment for 15 years than some uncle for someone else's. They began to google — and immediately a problem arose. It turned out that no one would give me a mortgage: most Russian banks issue mortgages only to clients over 21 years old (I was 20 at that time), and those few banks that issue mortgages from 18 require that the borrower's work experience be longer years (and I was just taken to the staff of the «New»). We agreed as follows: my mother would take a mortgage (she wondered for a long time whether she would be reduced in the near future, then it was rumored that her organization would be affected by reductions), and my parents and I would pay for it together. Let's pull it out together.
Then we began to think about where to get the money for the down payment on the mortgage. In 2012, when I was still at school, my parents sold the apartment given to us by my grandmother in Abdulino, took out a loan and bought a single apartment in Samara (and they could have bought some piece of iron on wheels!) — they thought that I would study and live there is the nearest big city to us. That's where this one comes in handy. In April 2019, the parents evicted tenants from it and began to look for buyers. The real estate market in Samara was then stagnant, the ads I posted in online services did not help in any way — I had to contact a realtor. We sold the apartment in May 2019 for the same 1.3 million rubles that we bought it seven years ago.
And the reality kept coming. While my parents were selling an old apartment in Samara, I was looking for a new apartment in Moscow — and I was systematically disappointed in life. It turned out that
we can’t even afford a secondary housing on the outskirts (we immediately decided that we couldn’t afford an apartment more than 4 million), we can only afford apartments in new buildings under construction, so we will have to become equity holders.
This word — «investor» — terribly scared my mother, she immediately remembered all the television stories about Moscow long-term construction, so I had to reassure her and explain that there are good developers and that not all equity holders are deceived. “Let's pray,” my non-religious mother agreed, and I went to the sales offices of residential complexes under construction. But even here I was disappointed. Where the prices for one flat were not quite cosmic (I found an option in the residential complex under construction in Kotelniki for only three million rubles, ridiculous money at the present time), either the apartment was planned to be rented somewhere in the fourth quarter of 2022, or it was 30 minutes to the metro minutes by minibus across the Moscow Ring Road. I remember how the sales manager of apartments in one of the residential complexes half an hour from the Myakinino metro station convinced me with a blue eye that when the residential complex is completed, a ferry will be launched along the Moscow River for local residents to the metro — and in winter, they say, you can cut off the path along the ice .In general, I didn’t find suitable odnushki, but I found a suitable studio in Lyublino — yes, only 21.6 square meters, but just for 4 million, 15 minutes walk from the metro and from the MCD station, and the developer promised to hand over the house in the fourth quarter of 2020.
In May 2019, my mother took out a mortgage for 2.2 million rubles at 10% per annum for 12 years (just how many years my mother had before retirement, and the bank refused to approve a mortgage for a longer period). At the same time, my mother remotely entered into an agreement on participation in shared construction with the developer. As a down payment, the parents made the 1.3 million rubles received from the sale of the apartment, 350 thousand rubles that they had saved for a car, another 150 thousand rubles were given by the grandmother — she collected them for her funeral.
Then the monthly mortgage payment was 26 thousand rubles. The amount, it seemed to us, was not terrible. But it turned out that the mortgage is terrible not only for its payments.
Most of my parents' acquaintances in Abdulino live with loans — some pay a loan for a car, some for an apartment, some for a child's wedding (the Orenburg region is generally heavily indebted, according to statistics, almost 29% of the income of residents of the region goes to pay loans). At the same time, loans do not seem to put much pressure on them — people manage to take out new loans in order to go to the sea, make repairs or buy household appliances. Everything is different with my parents, for them a loan is a burden that needs to be removed as soon as possible. “What if I lose my job? And suddenly the salary will be lowered, and we have such debts? — my mother repeated to me more than once, explaining why she began to spend all her holidays in Abdulino. Before the mortgage, she often bought preferential vouchers from her trade union organization and used them to go on vacation at sea, flew to Georgia, and once even made a tour of Germany, the Czech Republic and France. Now she stays at home — to save money and make an early payment on the mortgage in excess of the required one. According to her, she and her father do not save on food — their diet has not changed. But she, for example, cannot buy a new phone — more precisely, she can, but she says that she will wear out her old buggy smartphone until we pay off the mortgage.