Girts, a lanky 40-year-old doctor's assistant, works three jobs in three hospitals for a monthly salary of $1,350 and spends half his income servicing a euro-denominated mortgage on his apartment.
"People have had the feeling we were going to become the next Argentina for a while now," said Leonardo Brum, 33, a lawyer in the capital, Montevideo, whose dollar-denominated mortgage payments have grown from a quarter to more than half of his salary since the peso was floated.
Many Lithuanians took out low-interest-rate mortgages denominated in foreign currencies.
This was a country that took advantage of global capital markets to fund mortgages denominated in foreign currencies.
The urban middle class has been hit by the degraded value of its savings and the rising cost of mortgages denominated in foreign currency.
The IMF reckons that Polish households took on mortgages denominated in Swiss francs that were worth about 12% of GDP in 2008.
Many homeowners in Poland, Croatia and other countries who have taken out mortgages denominated in Swiss francs counted the cost of soaring repayments.
Interest rates on mortgages denominated in Swiss francs were around 4 percent, while rates on forint loans could be in the double digits.
Instead, the banks pushed mortgages denominated in foreign currencies — largely the euro and the Swiss franc — where interest rates were much lower than in the local currency markets.
In Poland, where mortgages denominated in Swiss francs were directly tied to interest rates in Switzerland, the worst-hit households are paying only about 20% more to service their mortgages, according to Mr Dübel.
Hungary's central bank has proposed stricter limits on loan-to-value ratios for mortgages denominated in foreign currencies.Even so, some regulators may prefer to eliminate the dangers of these loans altogether rather than just limit them.
