> So the notion that you're meaningfully building equity doesn't actually apply until well into the mtge term. If prices were flat that would be true. I bought my first house a little over 10 years ago for $300k. I paid $60k down and $1,200 a month for 4 years. I sold the house for $550,000. I paid in $118,000 over those 4 years and after paying off the mortgage walked away with $230,000. I put that into another house that we paid $650,000 for. Between the $230,000 down and 7 years of mortgage payments I've paid in $390,000. The house is appraised at $1.1M today. If I sold today my net would be about $700,000. Turning $60,000 in savings into $700,000 over 11 years is a 25% annual ROI, and that's after paying all the front-loaded jew usury. The icing on the cake is that my mortgage payment has been less than the rent on a 2-bedroom apartment for all of these 11 years. I literally got paid $5,300 a month every month for 11 years to live in a house. To rent the equivalent would cost me about that, so it would have cost me $10,000 a month more to rent than to own.