When a loan officer in Vilnius shows a buyer how a 35 year term reduces their monthly payment versus a 25 year term on the same loan, the number looks compelling. On a 153000 euro mortgage at around 3.7 percent interest, the difference is about 132 euros a month, which covers a phone bill, a grocery run, and something left over. February 2025 was the biggest month for mortgage lending in Lithuanian history, with banks issuing close to 240 million euros in new housing loans, nearly twice the…

Until the end of 2025, a Lithuanian who owned three mid range apartments and rented them all out could pay essentially zero in annual property tax. The old system gave every residential property owner a 150000 euro exemption. Municipalities set rates so low that most small landlords never saw a bill worth noticing. From January 1, 2026, that is gone. Any residential property you own beyond your declared main home gets pooled with the rest and taxed on the combined registered value under a…

A man I know in Vilnius, a software developer in his late thirties, has about 17000 euros sitting in his second pillar pension fund, and he genuinely cannot decide what to do with it. He has been thinking about it for months. He has talked to friends, asked his accountant, read three or four explainers, and the file on his kitchen table is still open to the same spreadsheet he was staring at in November. The withdrawal window opened on January 2, 2026, and runs until the end of 2027. Every…

Not long ago, the governor of the Bank of Lithuania stood in front of reporters and called the situation with deposit rates “obscene.” The ECB had been raising rates for months, mortgage rates had crossed four percent, consumer loan rates were pushing nine percent, and Swedbank was still paying its Lithuanian depositors a flat 0.2 percent on fixed term accounts. SEB had moved to 0.6 percent. On a ten thousand euro deposit left for twelve months at Swedbank, that worked out to twenty euros in…

Aurimas Vaška, a contractor from Kaunas, took out a 6000 euro consumer loan in the spring of 2022 to cover a bathroom renovation he had been putting off for two years. At the time, his bank quoted him a rate of 11.4 percent APR, which he accepted without shopping around because the process was straightforward and the monthly payment of just under 140 euros felt manageable against his income. He didn't think much about the rate after that, paid his installments, and generally ignored the…