I think the comparison of a house vs other investments is a bad comparison - you need to live somewhere. You need to compare buying a house to renting a house o

I think the comparison of a house vs other investments is a bad comparison - you need to live somewhere. You need to compare buying a house to renting a house or apartment or whatever. People do view houses as investments, sure, but I think that's fundamentally misleading. Compare the basic cash flow of the different options available. Figure out how much you're willing to pay for being close to work, close to friends, having more or less space, being in a walkable neighbourhood or whatever else matters. As much as I enjoy the illusory dollar value gains of home ownership, ultimately I had to work within the confines of my budget. Also I think this line of thought is also misleading: "For most people, their home investment represents a large part of their net worth." That's true but it's because of inflated house prices and reflects the fact that Americans don't save that much. Again, just treat a house as a liability and not an asset and suddenly this is meaningless and we can get back to managing cash flows and thinking about increasing savings. (Although as a side note, being very aggressive savers isn't necessarily great for a country as a whole, Germany is very conflicted about it's very high savings rates - for example, https://www.dw.com/en/why-cant-germans-stop-saving-money/a-46017138 https://www.dw.com/en/why-cant-germans-stop-saving-money/a-4...)