At some stage this afternoon we should all be in a position to establish, with a degree of certainty, where the interest rate on our mortgage is likely to sit over the next few months.
The clarity should emerge soon after the chief boffins over at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt emerge from their monthly meeting and tell us about where they want euro-zone interest rates to go. If they decide to cut rates, as some expect, that should send our mortgage repayments down. And if they decide to hold them steady until next month (when a cut might be more likely), our monthly dues will be steady until then too.
The key message in all of this of course is that the short-term trend in euro-zone rates (and thus in Irish mortgage repayments) is a mildly negative one. This means that borrowing to pay for a house or apartment looks like becoming cheaper rather than more expensive.
One factor that will have been fairly high in the mind of the ECB board members when they met this morning will be the EU's housing market and, more specifically, the direction of house prices. There is a theory that when the cost of borrowing falls, house prices will rise as more people take advantage of cheaper finance and pile into the market, thus making competition for property even fiercer.
While this may not be such a massive issue in core European states such as Germany, it could be more significant in locations such as Spain and the Republic, where the housing market is already moving ahead at a furious pace. Could a cut in interest rates today or next month push things closer to overheating and disaster?
Friends First chief economist, Mr Jim Power, is not so sure. He acknowledges that lower mortgage rates will improve the affordability of Irish houses and apartments, thus making a "downward correction to property prices less likely than it might have been before". But he also argues that a cut in interest rates is unlikely to give a major fillip to the Irish market.
"The probability is that a cut today, or failing that, at the May meeting, would represent the bottom of the cycle and its likely magnitude (i.e. a cut of 0.25 per cent or at the very most 0.5 per cent) would not be sufficient to stimulate demand for housing and prices," he argues.
"The bottom line is that lower rates would certainly be good news for heavily indebted Irish mortgage holders but would not be sufficient in itself to stimulate increased demand."
Mr Power is expecting Irish house prices to increase by about 7 per cent this year, having soared by 14 per cent in 2003. This kind of smooth decline in growth would be seen as positive for those who worry that the market is running away with itself (in what some like to call a bubble) and could be heading for collapse. A different result could however be more problematic.
"A further acceleration in demand and consequently for house prices would not be good news as it would increase the chances of an unsustainable bubble. A gradual levelling off in house prices over the next couple of years would be the best and most sustainable outcome," says Mr Power.
Another argument that tends to circulate around the time of interest rate movements is the old "to fix or not to fix" issue, where borrowers look to beat the cycle by fixing their loans at what they see as the bottom of the interest rate curve. Mr Power is again dubious.
"The argument for fixing a mortgage is not strong at the moment, because the upside potential for ECB rates against the background of a moribund euro-zone economy will be very limited over the next couple of years. For those who are very risk-averse, the fixed rates on offer at the moment are as low as we are likely to see in this cycle, but there is still a significant premium to be paid over variable rates." A possible compromise, Mr Power suggests, would be to fix half the mortgage and leave the rest at a variable rate. "Having said that, I personally would not be concerned about being on a variable rate mortgage in the current interest rate environment."
