The insurance giant Aviva have produced a report which highlights the growing gap between the rich and the poor in the UK.
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By Aviva’s reckoning, 25% of households in this country are low income (net family monthly income of below £1.5K) with savings and investments in many cases of less than £100.
These families are also much less likely than their better off fellow citizens to own their own home. 41% of low income families own their own home, compared to 90% of high income families - and they face the threat of a rise in inflation, when their capacity to fund their lives is already under strain, which will inevitably mean that their ability to pay for the ordinary necessities of life will diminish, with all sorts of dreadful consequences.
This all comes against a background of historically low interest rates, but those low rates are of very little assistance to hard pressed, low income families, whose out goings are already stretched to breaking point, and who simply do not have the necessary slack to take up any cheap mortgage offers.
In any event, a rise in interest rates would only lead to the kind of levels of foreclosure and repossession we last saw in the 1990s, as families who took on a mortgage at current interest rates, would soon sink below the waves once interest rates increased, even to a modest extent.