Ben,

Thanks so much for the kind words. The time factor was really the biggest part of our decision to avoid buying a home. We kept thinking of the weekends spent mowing the lawn or other types of maintenance that a kid in single digits just couldn’t help out with.

You bring up a good point about housing generally increasing in value over time. However, my initial reaction is that housing a) can’t quite be categorized as an asset due to its overall lack of liquidity and b) inflation has an oversized part to play in real estate price appreciation.

This is just a gut feeling, but it’s a great subject for a future article. I would really like to dig into the math, so stay tuned.

Lastly, all real estate is local. Southern California is a completely different story than rural Iowa, and readers need to take that into consideration. Buying a home is a much more complex decision than the monthly payment.