Same job, same age, same inflation. He pays $120 a month more for it. His colleague pays nothing.

He is 43. He and his wife owe about $580,000 on a four-bedroom house they bought in 2019, and they have done nothing wrong with it. Paid every month. Built real equity. Started, quietly, to plan a first investment purchase for next year.

The man at the next desk is the same age, on the same pay band, and inherited enough a few years ago to clear his mortgage.

Today the Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 4.6 per cent. Rates are now at 15-year highs, as the ABC reports. For the first man, when his bank passes it on, that is roughly $120 a month more, on our arithmetic, before the next one. For the second man, it is a news item.

He is a composite, drawn from the questions we receive. His situation is not.

### The question he sent us

*"Inflation is everyone's problem. Fuel, power, groceries, all of it. But the only people being asked to actually give something up are the ones with a mortgage. My mate has no loan and nothing changes for him. How is that the fix? And what am I supposed to do with the plans I had?"*

We cannot tell him what to do with his money. We can tell him he has read the situation correctly.

### The answer: yes, it is deliberate, and the RBA said so

The ABC's Ian Verrender-style plain reading of the board statement is the honest one. The RBA said growth in demand "needs to remain subdued for a period to reduce capacity pressures and bring inflation back to target."

In ordinary words: households need to spend less so there is room in the economy for two things that have nothing to do with them. The most serious energy supply shock in 50 years, which is pushing up the cost of imported fuel. And, in the RBA's own framing, the biggest technology investment boom on record, which is pulling in expensive equipment and building data centres.

Governor Michele Bullock was clear this is not the pandemic version of excess demand, where cheap money and stimulus cheques sent everyone shopping. The ABC's analysis put it as the difference between doing 100 down a back road and doing 60 through a roadwork zone you did not notice.

Most households do not feel like they are overspending. They are being asked to spend less anyway.

Independent economist Chris Richardson said the quiet part out loud on The Business: "So the question becomes, who gets less money to spend? Who gets hit over the head? We have a system that uses interest rates to basically hit borrowers over the head."

That is the injustice in one sentence. Not that inflation is being fought. That one section of the population is doing all the fighting.

### The number nobody puts in the headline

Australia now has the second highest central bank interest rate among advanced economies, according to the ABC's report.

Not because of extreme fiscal recklessness. On the OECD's deficit comparison the piece cites, Australia sits broadly mid-pack and a long way behind the United States. The Treasurer points to two surpluses. The Opposition says spending is the cause. Both are partly right and neither is the person paying the $120.

The ABC also reports that between 2020 and 2026 cumulative inflation ran to 26.8 per cent. Research from the Centre for Policy Development found 7.2 percentage points of that came from administered prices, the government-set charges that are indexed to CPI and so bake last year's oil spike into this year's bills.

Those prices do not care whether you have a mortgage. The remedy does.

### There was another way to do it

This is the part that should sit uncomfortably.

The same research, as reported by the ABC, suggests a temporary 0.5 per cent lift in the superannuation guarantee could take about $2 billion a quarter out of the economy. That is roughly the effect of a 0.25 percentage point rate rise.

The difference is who carries it. A super lever touches everyone earning a wage, mortgage or not, and the money stays theirs. A rate lever touches borrowers only, and the money is gone.

Asked about it, the governor said that was "not at all within our gift." Fair. It is the government's gift. So far it has not been given.

Richardson's line was that we get to pick our poison. His follow-up was the sharper one: we could spread the dose across more people rather than giving one group so much it nearly kills them.

### What it means for you

If you own your home with equity and a mortgage, you are the instrument. That is not a moral judgement on you. It is a description of how the machine is built.

The expensive mistake is to treat that as a timing problem. To sit on your hands until the headlines change, or to lurch the other way and buy something because a spruiker says rates have peaked. Nobody knows when they have peaked. The RBA does not publish a date.

The question that actually matters is the one our composite asked at the end, and it is about structure. Does what you own, and what you are planning to own, hold up at 4.6 per cent and a bit more? Are your buffers real or assumed? Is your debt arranged so that one more increase is an annoyance rather than a forced sale?

Those are questions with answers. Rate predictions are not.

### The Ripehouse reframe

Rates are one input, and they are the same input for everyone in the country. They do not explain why two streets in the same suburb are having completely different years right now, one with stock sitting and one where nothing lasts a fortnight. Street-level demand, land, vacancy and the quality of the asset do that. The headline does not.

That is why we do not build portfolios around the cash rate. We build them around the asset, the street and the data, and then structure the debt so the cycle can do what cycles do.

Across 997 client portfolios since 2021, the median result has been +19.0 per cent portfolio growth per year on a 5-year rolling basis, against about 4.3 per cent nationally.1 We publish the full distribution, including the portfolios that underperformed. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

Being the one hit over the head is not a discipline failure. It is a structure problem, and structure is fixable.

If you want to know whether yours holds at these rates, the first step is a 15-minute Legacy Sequence Diagnostic: ripe.house/4bV7I8u. No pressure. No obligation. Just a clearer picture than you had before.

1 National benchmark: CoreLogic/Cotality. Ripehouse figures are median client portfolio growth, 5-year rolling basis.