Most young Japanese would rather have no debts
A recent survey from iShare took a look at paying back lump sums on home loans, and found out, as usual, some interesting opinions.
Demographics
Between the 27th and 29th of July 2010 1,487 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. All the respondents had a home loan in either their own or their spouse’s name. 73.8% of the sample were male, 2.9% in their twenties, 30.1% in their thirties, and 67.0% in their forties.
Note than in Japan as far as I am aware the only form of home loan is a repayment mortgage. Despite endowment-type life insurance and hospital fee policies being popular, as far as I am aware there are no endowment loans, nor pension loans or other interesting but more risky methods. I did however see a loan advertised on the back of a newspaper in the train saying something like paying an extra 10% up front then absolutely zero interest for the 15 year duration of the loan!
You can see immediately from the demographics that few people in their twenties appear to have home loans, a surprising figure to me. In Q5, the reluctance to have loans is also a surprise; in the UK a mortgage is a fact of life, and car loans are also rather common. I’d like to see a survey delving further into the Japanese way of looking at lending.
My home loan is for a scary length with a scary amount of cash to pay back – I had hoped that What Japan Thinks and the rest of my empire would help out accelerate the repayment schedule, but sadly that hasn’t quite gone to plan…
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