Nobody can yet say whether next Spring will bring a significant mortgage interest rise - but anyone owning or buying a home would be well advised to get all the facts and figures from Experian needed to prepare for that eventuality now.

If that sounds a gloomy conclusion it is, nevertheless, what the market is expecting from a Chancellor who by this time in 2015 - years of austerity having signally failed to yield the results expected - may be running out of options.

It could seem cynical for the Government to apply a stimulus to the housing market now by making things easier for some buyers who would otherwise have been excluded from the process, while (possibly) planning a phased programme of incremental mortgage interest rise hikes early next year.

June 18 is the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo (interestingly, a battle only made possible for the British by the Government obtaining massive credit to finance the campaign), and by that date in 2015 some people who found they could get on to the housing ladder with a Government finance deal and some optimistic personal finance-stretching may have to ask themselves if it was a bridge too far.

On the other hand the honeymoon period of low interest cannot last forever, and it is only realistic for anyone buying a home to plan according to the worst-case scenario.

To put a figure on the likely damage - if the spring brings rises of the sort many analysts seem to envisage - someone with a £150,000 mortgage could have to find another £230 per month, based on a 2.5 per cent increase in the base rate.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) states, quite credibly, that just under a quarter of Britain’s 11.2 million mortgage holders would have to take major action to make up the shortfall - or find a way of increasing their income.

If there are two reasonable salaries going into the house, that might not be an insurmountable problem, but with most wages static and many other costs rising it could prove an intolerable strain for those unprepared for a hefty mortgage interest rise.

While new and recent buyers may have to look to their future finances, the other end of the swings-and-roundabouts equation is that savers who have lost out on interest will finally start to see a return to something like reasonable payouts - but by the time the turnaround comes most will probably not feel like winners.

We are just over a month into the new financial year, and for individual home owners and savers, as much as for companies, it can never be too early to plan ahead for the range of possibilities that could develop over the course of the next 11 months.

While we can complain about government policy of the way it is introduced it could be too many of us haven’t done the maths in the first place - and that could mean not far short of three million households finding themselves in some new degree of difficulty.

Fixing a workable plan now (for example it might be worth overpaying now while the interest rate is low) is the best defence a mortgage interest rise that could otherwise be too difficult for many of us to swallow.