manunderstress.com

I’ve always been a little suspicious of home owner zealots that incessantly talk up ownership as miracle investment. Sure there are those who get great deals, and those who do their own renovations, but as Kiplingers points out, the investment is only decent on average. The verdict is still out for me, even though I was fortunate enough to get a foreclosure. The amount of money sucked out of my wallet for projects and repairs (seemingly trivial but never ending) is staggering. I haven’t kept tabs on every single Home Depot receipt, but it’s ridiculous. And the chores….good god with the chores.

You get decent appreciation. The operative word is decent. Sure, price gains in a few hot markets, mostly on the East and West coasts, outperformed Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the past 30 years. But most local housing markets didn’t come close. Nationally, home prices rose an average of 6.2% a year, exceeding the rise in consumer prices by just two percentage points a year and lagging well behind the S&P 500′s annualized return of 12.3% since 1977.