Homeownership by itself is not useful, but it does promote saving. For the average family, a home is the most expensive thing they will ever save for. After 10

Homeownership by itself is not useful, but it does promote saving. For the average family, a home is the most expensive thing they will ever save for. After 10 years in that mortgage, they'll have significant equity that they probably wouldn't have otherwise had Does it? This presumes that for those entire 10 years, the family never refinanced the house, and never used that refinancing to pull equity out. I don't have any statistics in front of me, but given as big a market as there was for refinance deals, I imagine the number of homes being cash-out refinanced was nowhere near negligible. I can imagine the temptation was quite large for anyone not independently wealthy, but wanting to live the good life anyway. Does anyone have a source for numbers of homes refinanced out of all possible homes in the past 10 years? Even more interesting to me would be statistics on the amount that tended to be cashed out in said transactions.