Interest rates are on the rise

and people are complaining about it?

It was inevitable  that they were going to rise. They have been very low for longer than most people expected. My small savings have been going backwards rather than forwards. I would like them to have at least kept pace with the rate of inflation.

But I know people who are saying even the most minimal of rate rises are causing them problems. Their mortgage rates have gone up. 

I wonder about this. Were they really unaware that this might happen? I do not pretend to know a lot about these things but I do think even I might have thought about the possibility that I might need to pay more out on my mortgage each month.

Of course I don't have mortgage and I will never have one. When I move from here, as I inevitably will, it will have to be into something much smaller, much less convenient and much less comfortable. For the moment I need to stay where I am. The rest of the family has claims on the Senior Cat's estate and at some time in the next two years the house must, by law, be sold or we risk a heavy financial penalty.  

We all knew this was coming. Middle Cat and I have been looking at real estate advertisements for months now. I have known this time was coming for years and I have been doing my best to save for it. It is the way my world works. Those very low interest rates have worked against me. It has increased the cost of housing as people believed they could afford something more and more expensive.

My parents built this house just after the Senior Cat retired. It was the first house they had ever really owned. The one prior to that had been owned by my mother's parents. My mother hated it, largely because of some very unhappy experiences in it and memories of it. The Senior Cat wanted my mother to have a home she could really call her own. This house is an average suburban house on an average suburban block. It has more windows than most because my mother wanted it that way. The Senior Cat and I would have preferred more bookshelf space but he did as she wanted.

For all that the house is not yet fifty years old it will almost certainly be bought by someone who will knock it down and put up two "homes" in its place. The idea appalls me but there will be nothing we can do about that. People will pay as much for each "home" as we will get for what amounts to the land. It is the way things are going now. More and more houses are being built on two levels. That's unusual here. The idea of "going upstairs to bed" is not nearly as common here but it is becoming more so.

But so many people still expect to have a single unit detached dwelling on a block of land that the price of housing keeps rising.

Me? I'd like space for my books, for my craft materials and to simply move around. I went out yesterday afternoon and looked at the outside of a "unit" not far from here. Somebody else was doing the same thing. We worked out he could actually touch the walls on either side of the single bedroom. I am not sure  how they were allowed to build something quite that small. It is smaller than the bedroom I lived in while I was at university in London.

I thought of the tiny spaces some people in Hong Kong live in. If you grow up that way then you might think it is acceptable. I don't think I could handle it. I want space to breathe.

I can understand the attraction of that single unit dwelling on a separate block of land...but is it really realistic?