[paganel]

The price to stay in the house you own is almost never close to zero, you still have to pay the bills, the repairs and the property taxes. If the house you live in becomes bigger than your salary can afford (let’s say you built a McMansion when you used to earn $200-300,000 per year) then you’ll have a really, really hard time staying afloat when you suddenly become unemployed and you can’t even find a job for the next 12 months, if not more. The bills will keep piling up, you’d sell the house and move away to greener pastures where they still have decent jobs but you find out that that would entail a 50-to-80% cut on the value of the house (the most probably reason for you losing your job is because the economy sucks, during which time no-one sane will pay close-to-parity money for a house), your marriage will most probably be in the doldrums, too (imho financial-caused stress is one of the biggest reasons for divorce) and you wished that younger you hadn’t put all his eggs in this one big house which right now drives you into the ground.