A story doing the rounds this week about a couple, Hannah and Max, who continued pooling their finances after Max was made redundant, taking what they call "drastic measures" to cut spending, might read as a simple personal finance anecdote. For the property market, however, it is a useful proxy for a much larger and more consequential trend: the fragility of dual-income mortgage affordability in a higher-rate, higher-cost environment. With average UK mortgage repayments having risen by more than 60% since 2021 for those remortgaging off fixed deals, the financial resilience of households — not just their combined income at the point of application — has become the single biggest determinant of who can stay in their home and who cannot.