Let's get our terminology right

I just received a message addressed to "all house owners".

Yes, I own a house. So I read on.

"How to reduce your mortgage now that interest rates are going up."

I repeat, I own a house. I actually own it outright. I owe no money on it. It is not rented, equity released, hire purchased, leased, or mortgaged. Owning a house does not mean you have a mortgage.

Now this imprecision annoys me. Okay, we can probably assume that most house owners in the UK do in fact have a mortgage, and that's obviously what the marketers were relying on.

But at a deeper level, there's an equation of ownership with debt which is actually quite worrying. And I notice in a lot of media reporting that higher interest rates are judged to be bad for individuals because they increase mortgage rates.

Hang on; some of us have savings. So interest rates going up should be a cause for celebration. If interest rates double, I'll be getting a reasonable return from my savings accounts - though my equity portfolio might be buggered... But this aspect seems rarely to be reported with much glee - it's the mortgage aspect that hits the headlines.

Which rather reflects, I think, the problem that we currently have; easy borrowing and excess liquidity have driven up asset prices, but left us with a huge backlog of debt and massive gearing against the market. Debt has become normalised (and student loans have a bit to do with that, too; if you start your working life already thirty grand in debt, do you ever see yourself getting more assets than debt, other than by house price inflation?)

So let's have a bit more precision in our use of language, and make sure that we specify 'house owner' as someone who owns a house, and 'mortgagor' as someone who owes money on a mortgage. The two are not and ought not to be synonymous!