[psunavy03]

All renting gets you is the "privilege" of paying someone else's mortgage. The entire point of homeownership is to build equity and pay off the mortgage.

That way, when you retire, your nest egg can go further because you only have to pay the property taxes, and when you die, you can pass the value along to your heirs and build generational wealth.

Houses are not index funds; ideally they should only appreciate at the rate of inflation. But they are absolutely long-term builders of generational wealth through the equity in the home. Heirs can sell them and then invest the proceeds, or live in them themselves without a mortgage.

[bombcar]

They can be great, but you need to really run the numbers and check the assumptions.

Housing where it is "affordable" (read: median salary can afford a house) is a great way to get a leg up on the pile - though remember that the average age of a person RECEIVING and inheritance is 60.

But in places were buying a house is $2m but renting the same one is $3k a month, it's hard to ever make the numbers work.

[BobaFloutist]

>All renting gets you is the "privilege" of paying someone else's mortgage. The entire point of homeownership is to build equity and pay off the mortgage.

Where I live, what renting currently gets you is an enormous discount compared to the cost of a mortgage and the opportunity cost of parking your cash into a downpayment. Renting and investing downpayment level money is literally a better deal than buying a house.

Why do I care if I'm "paying someone else's mortgage"? The interest payments to the bank aren't building me equity either! It's all money, going one way or another, equity is just more money, and sometimes buying a house means more money goes out than in compared to renting, even if it's more intuitively satisfying.

[psunavy03]

You care when you're 60 years old, trying to figure out how to live the rest of your life on a fixed income, and still either have to pay rent for the rest of your life or spend a big chunk of cash on a house, because you didn't spend 20-30 years paying a mortgage.

[BobaFloutist]

Not if I literally have higher assets than if I did spend 20-30 years paying a mortgage!