Comment by jimnotgym
16 hours ago
That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.
16 hours ago
That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.
Unfortunately it's become embedded in the system with the houses themselves becoming vastly over inflated.
A Ponzi scheme.
> Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.
Sadly, the way all Western economies have devolved over the last decades, real estate equity is the only form of wealth that at least some part of the 99% has for retirement.
Broad market index funds have performed spectacularly over the last few decades, and far more than 1% have them (or could have had them) for retirement. It has been the standard recommendation since I graduated college in the early 2000s.
Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather than broad market index funds.
This is specifically about those who had been earning money in the ~1980 to ~2010 period, for the vast majority, their house should not have been the only equity.
> Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather than broad market index funds.
The problem is, index funds have no inherent value, they (just like all stocks and other financial derivatives/instruments) are effectively a paper with one or another form of "IOU" written on it. Economic crashes, wars, tariffs, morons in politics, whatever, there are tons of ways massive amounts of value can be straight up destroyed in a matter of days.
A house however? As long as it's reasonably well built, come what may, you still have a roof over your head. No one's gonna come and kick you out of it. And that's inherent value.
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