The best piece of news in the financial markets for many months has just emerged.

Owner-occupiers are refusing to join the hysteria about endowment mortgages.

The Financial Services Authority says of the 11 million endowment policies currently supporting home loans, almost five million might not produce a lump sum on maturity large enough to pay off the original loan.

Are these five million endowment policy holders worried? Apparently not, for the FSA confirms 3.46 million of them have so far taken no action whatever. They are sitting tight and ignoring the disturbing coded letters from lenders which might induce panic and depression in lesser folk.

Six months ago, many industry insiders urged homeowners to ignore the fuss and do nothing. Not every endowment mortgage holder was going to be affected.

If the policyholder is nearing retirement and has no private savings or redundancy pay-off, no privatisation shares in the drawer and no prospect of inheriting money and based his life plan on repaying the last penny of his mortgage on his 65th birthday, he will be disturbed by an unexpected bill running into four figures.

In most cases, however, these people took out mortgages 20 or 25 years ago, and in nearly all areas of the country now sit on a substantial tax-free capital gain. If the debt is large, they could sell up and trade down to a smaller property, as thousands do anyway in late middle age.

But people in this position represent only a tiny proportion of the total number of homebuyers.

For most of the others, the endowment mortgage problem threatens, at worst, to take a bite out of the lump sum which many build steadily in bricks and mortar over several decades.

Anybody sitting in a £75,000 property, for example, is currently enjoying a lump sum gain of about £6,000 a year, if latest surveys from the Nationwide and Halifax are accurate.

So one or two years of profit on your home might be lost by a poorly-performing endowment.

Hardly Armageddon and scarcely in the same bracket as the Nineties recession which cut 25 per cent off property values.

Colin Jackson of financial advisor Baronworth investment Services, with 20,000 clients on his books, said a couple of dozen people had expressed concerns about endowment mortgages.

He said: "A great amount of fuss is going on. In reality, it will affect a small number of people."

Another financial adviser, Frank Cochran of FSC Investment Services, said: "Endowments have had three years of underperformance and everybody has gone mad. I blame the life companies, who are so terrified of the FSA, and groups putting pressure on the FSA.

"As for the idea homeowners should junk endowments and take out repayment loans instead, this possibly makes sense if they quit their pension schemes as well.

"Both represent long-term investment in equities, bonds and Government securities and, if these crumple for the rest of our lifetime, our spare money really ought to go under the bed instead."

The medium-term defence against endowment shortfall is to take out an individual savings account (ISA) and build a tax-free lump sum.

You might be able to claim compensation or even persuade your endowment provider to cover any eventual loss.

A few policyholders have already done so.

An IFA free factsheet for those confused about endowment options is available on 0800 085 3250 or the web site www.unbiased.co.uk.