The 4.5 million Romanians who took loans from banks pay about five billion euros a year in form of instalments, reveal ZF’s calculations, that is as much as they spend on cigarettes, beer and soft drinks – the biggest markets in the consumer industry.
The average indebtedness of those who took out loans stood at 28% at the end of 2008, according to the latest NBR data. With the Romanians’ salary incomes standing at almost 19 billion euros (per year), the volume of instalments on loans revolves around 5 billion euros. This means that every person who has a loan to repay spends an annual average of 1,100 euros on instalments.
The repayment effort increased after the interest rate hike at the beginning of the financial crisis in the autumn of 2008, and NBR data reveal bankers are in no hurry to adjust costs for loans in progress. Given that interests on the loans sold in the previous years are not tied to a transparent indicator (as the regulations in force stipulate), and banks can arbitrarily set the interest level, the loan instalment repayment effort remains high, while many people are seeing their incomes dwindle and the price of other assets going down, such as the decline in the price of homes and land, which is the most visible of all.
This is the burden of the almost five years of lending boom (2004-2008), when loans taken by individuals increased ten times, to 25 billion euros.

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