[Yetanfou]

I live in Sweden myself, having emigrated from the Netherlands. With the proceedings of my relatively modest house in the Netherlands I could buy a 21 hectare farm in Sweden, no mortgage needed. Mind, this is after I paid off the remaining mortgage on the Dutch house. That house was in one of the least popular 'cities' in the Netherlands, the scare quotes around the word city are because many people consider the place (Lelystad) to be a failed city - it was an experiment in city planning in the 70's, a totally new city concept built on totally new (reclaimed) land. The place feels like an agglomeration of suburbs without a real 'living' centre.

The point of this is that I wonder why Swedes get into so much debt. Housing is (apart from Stockholm and Göteborg and some popular areas in other cities) affordable by my Dutch standards. Wages are on par with the Netherlands, taxes are comparable (both are high-tax countries for wage earners), cost of living depends very much on your life style but is comparable to or slightly higher than the Netherlands. Still, Swedes seem to take on enormous loans for some unfathomable reason. Unfathomable, because it certainly is possible to live free here, without that yoke of debt. It might be a status thing, people want to live in those expensive areas even though you can get more space for half the price only a few kilometres away.