Not me

If you own a home in the United States, though, chances are your monthly payment hasn’t gone up at all. That’s because a vast majority of homes in this country are bought using 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages. If you locked in a rate of 3 percent last year, your monthly payment will stay the same for the next three decades, no matter what happens with interest rates, home prices or overall inflation.

In Britain, mortgage rates have also risen rapidly. But the impact of higher rates looks very different. That’s because most mortgages there have fixed rates for only two to five years. (Others have variable rate mortgages that automatically change whenever the Bank of England raises or lowers interest rates.) As my colleague Eshe Nelson reported recently, millions of Britons expect their interest rates to jump up over the next year. Inevitably, some of them won’t be able to afford the resulting higher payments, and will be forced to leave their homes.