Russians Paying Up to Turn Rubles Into Homes: Mortgages
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Denis Ichetkin’s decision to get a mortgage for a one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Moscow in late January couldn’t have been better timed, he said.
The 30-year-old journalist and his wife Veronika secured a 15-year loan from VTB Group with a 12 percent interest rate before Russia’s March incursion into Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Since then, the central bank has raised its key interest rate by 2 percentage points to arrest the ruble’s slide, spurring economists to predict that home-loan costs, already triple the European average, will rise further.