Rent. Don't expose yourself to that kind of volitility, leveraged, at that volume. The idea that a house is a good investment fails to recognize how many alternative better investments there are. There is one reason why it makes sense. It's because if instead of paying rent you can accumulate net worth, that's a smart thing to do... but this current environment makes it risky. It's your call on whether or not the risk is going to be worth it, but in general, if the risk is substaintial (as in possibly ruinous) you don't do it no matter what gains are expected, and I'm not even sure it can be said that gains are expected at all. I did some things others would call risky in crypto and it worked out for me. The difference is that if I lost a chunk of my money I had a job and would still have zero debt. It was zero substaintial risk. For a home you could actually end up underwater. I had zero probability of that. That's the irony of people too afraid to do crypto but willing to buy a home in this market. People's sense of risk is dictated by what they associate with risk rather than any objective thought. They think traditionally buying a home isn't risky, when in reality it definately is. If someone does buy a home because avoidence of rent still makes sense to them, I would buy the smallest home I could manage to live in even if I had the money for more. You can throw your excess income into a more thought out investment instead. Then you aren't paying rent but you are minimizing your exposure to a market no sane person would want exposure to unless they were actually seeking real estate exposure (because they think they know something). But even the smallest homes people can find are still at a scale that I think it doesn't make sense. Rule of thumb. If you had 50% odds of doubling your money in a year but face a 5% chance of ruin, you don't do it, because the entire point of money is risk management. The more money you have the less risk you have in your life because you can use money to solve problems. It's all actually a risk calculation. But if you failed to double your money you still wouldn't be at any significant risk, but if you go with it, you now do have risk. Do you see how on our final metric of value it doesn't make sense. So at 5% of real risk (you're fucked) the expected gains needed to justify it are well past 100% APY. They say you need to accept risk to get reward. One, I would argue that is lazy thinking. And two, usually the smart people who make that calculation segregate risk from substancial risk (the kind that can actually fuck you), and only trade risk of loss (that wouldn't fuck them) against gains. And even then they work very hard to minimize even the non-substaincial risk.