On October 10, 2016, Corinne Cahen, the Minister of the Family and Integration, and Carlo Thill, Vice President of ABBL, signed a statement of intent aiming to allow young parents to suspend their mortgage during their parental leave.

What's the goal of this measure?

To facilitate parental leave in spite of monthly mortgage payments. Indeed, currently, not all young employed parents can manage to take their parental leave since their revenue will be reduced during their period of absence from work. The risk is that there is a threat that their monthly revenue would diminish and also, as a result, this would jeopardize the monthly payment of their mortgage.

Therefore, the measure proposed by the Minister of the Family and ABBL would aim at granting families a suspension to their mortgage during the period of parental leave.

Is this actually good news?

Not really, because this statement of intent specifies that it will be a support measure by banks on a voluntary basis, or in other words, not required.

Every bank can decide on its own conditions, and it will be up to young parents to review and negotiate the terms with their banking establishment. And the fact still remains that to date, nothing is keeping families with a mortgage burden from informing their banks of their parental leave and to ask for the current loan to be adapted, so we don't really see what good this new measure will do.

In any case, we should still hope that this will incite banks to soften their conditions and adapt mortgages during the parental leave period!

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