Comment: ‘Martin Lewis’ savings campaign will help buyers with no Bank of Mum and Dad’

I know that suggesting saving to most people right now is tantamount to abuse. “Save what?” you might quite reasonably ask.

But, if Martin Lewis, our collective hero, gets his way then it will be worth figuring out an answer to that question.

The Money Saving Expert is currently campaigning to get the rate rises causing havoc with all our personal finances to be applied to savings accounts in the way they have been to mortgages.

The reasoning behind that is simple: the base rate is rising in an attempt to reduce spending power. A friendlier way to take money out of the economy is to encourage people to save it instead of spending it.

Aside from ludicrous back chat about avocados and milky coffee, talk of saving has played a remarkably small role in home buying and owning discourse in recent years.

Not least because while interest rates were at a historic low, the returns on savings (or considered in some light, losses) were so negligible they could not contend with dirt cheap borrowing and unattainable house prices.

Realistically a privately renting Londoner without loaded parents might as well have bathed in flat whites for all the property their pitiful savings power would have got them.

Meanwhile having cleared the deposit hurdle and sitting on a rapidly appreciating asset, it’s understandable that homeowners were choosing holidays over boosting their housing equity.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and some of those people may well be regretting their choices now.

But looking forward, it may not be too late.

If savings rates do go up significantly, those instant gratification buys might seem less worth it than watching your money grow in the bank.