Some claim we are living in a free market, where riches are taking advantages from the market freedom and are ripping their money from everyone else. On the other hand, depending on the country, the markets are more or less government controlled. 

Some are pointing out that the government is making decisions based on lobbyists, trying to force in laws in favor of the big corporations by forcing smaller companies and consumers to loss, giving an advantage to the corporations, enforced by the government.

![law-1063249_1280.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmXW159NeXuSkLEEQYuXxjMdb738zohi9TMnKkziDuDTPw/law-1063249_1280.jpg)

Some say this is a form of free markets, as the rich just use their freedom to create restrictions to others.

Well that's not how deep I'm going to go.

We're going to buy a house - or basically an apartment from a row house, or is it terraced house? Town house? It doesn't matter at this point. To buy the house, we needed mortgage and we have plenty of banks we could discuss with.

Picking the right house is a very tricky thing, but in the end it was more difficult to find a bank that would want to loan us money. I know their moves are mostly based on the fact are we able to pay back or not. 

However most banks had some serious issues on how to say "No" to us. Let's take as an example, that we went to six different banks to talk about the loan.

![architecture-3338507_1280.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmPrsnnZ5QjEkU3TZqt8mWfb9u9eTnnqG6ATnt97tNrZUa/architecture-3338507_1280.jpg)

First two of the banks were my and my wifes banks. We got to discuss with them and they seemed really, really positibe.
"We'll let you know in 2-3 days" was what they both claimed. We never heard anything of them again and it's been over 2 months now.

This is not how you handle your customer relations, especially when we both have been 10+ years customers in these banks of ours. We both agreed at this point we would be happy to change our banks when we are not desired customers in our current banks.

But this is great, banks are free to choose their customers and not be forced to serve their customers.

One bank was handling their job perfectly. They stated we are too risky customers for them as we don't have permanent work contracts, so they cannot trust we can pay back. This is a simple, understandable explanation. 

Two banks stated that government regulations <b>require</b> them to calculate in a specific way and it states they cannot give us the loan. According to them, this certain type of calculation is mandatory.

The last bank we visited disagreed on this, they just stated it's a recommendation and banks are not obliged to use the "special calculations".

This is one special thing. The two banks were claiming they are bound by government control, when they didn't want to admit they made the decision themselves not to grant us the mortgage. At this point, we were more upset at the "government control" when they were just blaming on the government while they didn't want us as their customers.

Very handy.

However we were happy in the end. The sixth and last bank promised to give us mortgage loan within the first 5 minutes of discussion and we got good terms. They were happy to have us as customers and gave us some pointers on the actual rules and regulations and what kind of limits they put to mortgages.

![gold-680131_1280.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmV7L1V14scNYKoxcawehC9e5oySp7WXbVRRYVS5imjTRf/gold-680131_1280.jpg)

I'm not sure if some of the banks were unsure what they were allowed to do or not, but I'm assuming they were using the possibilities of free markets and didn't want themselves to look bad by not granting us a mortgage. Extremely handy, as they can protect their own image and just blame the issue on the others, assuming no bank would give us any money.

We're lucky the issue was not actually the government restrictions and laws, as then we wouldn't have got a loan from any bank.

Well the main point of this post was though, that we're buying a house. I couldn't just write a post bragging about it, especially when I'm not going to share any photos of the house. :) 

![architecture-3326363_1280.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmZZRyVE4uTffzxTGUEZ9gjX4W3d1J2TyVhT4H3DJ83eWD/architecture-3326363_1280.jpg)
<sub>Not our house</sub>

All images from Pixabay!