[dpark]

You're right that you cannot buy a house with $0 in the bank, pretty much regardless of what you make. No one is likely to give you a mortgage with $0 down, and if they do, it's going to be a bad deal for you.

Back on topic, we did go down an odd path specifically about the house. My initial point really boils down to what you want to do with the money. It could be very life-changing to save $500k in ten years and retire somewhere cheap. If you're just going to buy a house, it's really not that life-changing, both because you can do that without 500k in cash, and because owning a house is really not that different day-to-day from renting.

I'm not clear what you mean when you say "10% is not even close to cutting it". If your retirement goals depend on a >10% return, you're likely to be disappointed. The S&P 500 has only been ~5%/year for the past 10 years, and that's before accounting for inflation. It wasn't doing so hot before that, either, with ~4%/year over the last 20.