'Risk of debt peril' when interest rates rise

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A "relatively benign" rise in interest rates still has the potential to double the number of households facing debt problems, a think tank has said.

A report by the Resolution Foundation said the UK had failed to deal with a "debt overhang", leaving the economy vulnerable to rate rises. It predicted that by 2018, 1.1 million households could be in "debt peril", compared with 600,000 now. This means more than half of their post-tax income goes on repaying debt, the BBC reports. It also suggested that households spending more than one third of their income on mortgage repayments could rise from 1.1 million to 2.3 million by 2018, equating to about one in four households with a mortgage. > Read: Households' pessimism about fina...

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