Irish Mortgage Brokers Blog

Paul Colgan from RTE covered this story about the proposed Personal Insolvency Bill which will update Ireland’s dated debt legislation. This is a more humane approach to dealing with debt issues and we are pleased to see it coming to fruition. Any legislation will have teething issues and will not be perfect, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Our foremost concern (as echoed in the clip) is about the regulation and oversight of any plan.

Karl was asked to appear on RTE’s ‘The Frontline’ because of his support of property tax. This is ‘the wrong step in the right direction’ in his opinion. Less income tax with local authorities supported by a ‘Site Value Tax’ is the way to go in his opinion. It was not a popular opinion.

We were talking about health insurance, car insurance and credit unions this month on TV3’s personal finance slot. On health insurance in particular we highlighted that you don’t have to go from ‘having cover’ to having zero cover, instead you could opt for the likes of the Hospital Saturday Fund which is a cash plan (pays out on health related spending but isn’t like regular insurance).

Car insurance was also a topic - the new EU ruling will make it illegal to rate men and women differently based on their sex alone from 21st December this year.

Credit Unions were (and are) in the news because of problems they are having. We’ll be back with TV3 next month for more!

Paul Colgan of RTE did a story about banking & rates charged by different lenders. He also asked whether future ECB rate cuts would be passed on to borrowers.

RTE interviewed Karl Deeter in this clip about the recent CSO report, it was on the 20th of December 2011.

John Finnerty interviewed us about the PTsb story that was in the Sunday Business Post.

In this piece we were speaking to Sybil & Martin about the banks passing on rate cuts and what to do if you got flooded recently.

In this piece by Stephen Murphy of TV3 we spoke about the issue of Regulators enforcing pricing and the fact that it is not a common practice.

This piece by Claire Brock of TV3 was about Mario Draghi’s unexpected rate cut of 0.25% last Thursday.

The debate about whether or not it will be passed on still rages. We spoke about that particular issue the following day on both LMFM and Newstalk.

We were delighted to take part earlier this month regarding the Keane Mortgage Report and the Presidential Race