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Comment by valdiorn | Hacker News Reader

ehm, are you not forgetting the small detail that if you forget to contribute to your "investment" (i.e. your house, i.e. pay your mortgage) this month, you become homeless?

> Paying your mortgage feels more urgent than contributing to a brokerage account

Of course it does, because if you spend your monthly brokerage allowance on a fancy dinner and booze, nothing too bad will happen. If you spend your mortgage payment on booze and steaks, you lose your house.

That's not a "mind trick", that's a real problem with serious repercussions. Housing is not just an investment for most people, it's THE investment, with life-changing, family destroying consequences if you don't keep it afloat.

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Renting has all of these problems and is the baseline. This pretend "no rent no mortgage" baseline doesn't exist.

Also getting kicked out of your owned house generally takes six months not six hours as you imply here. Which again is longer than you will get if you rent which is also not zero time.

"No rent no mortgage" absolutely exists - just because most people don't take advantage of it (or are structurally excluded from it because they live somewhere with insane housing costs) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The only bill you have to pay to keep your house is property taxes, which if you are in an area where you can buy a home in cash, probably means they're less than a car payment or even cell phone.

you forget the capital costs (aka, opportunity cost) in your home.

If you paid cash for a house, you're losing the risk free rate of a treasury bond (or the rental rate). That's a cost most people don't count, but only because they dont know how to do financial valuations properly.

I think they're arguing that the real contribution of home ownership is the incentive to regularly invest in an appreciating asset, not the fact that the asset is a house. I don't think they're arguing that the incentive is irrational.

Except that housing is not an asset, it's a fundamental good without with people can barely survive.

Making it appreciate is very problematic.

Is a vacation home an asset?

Well, ok, I have taken it a bit too far. Anything you can use or sell is technically an asset, even if it's more expensive to maintain than you would get on a sale (so even boats qualify).

But policy should never treat it as an asset. For policy, it should be a consumable good that only happens to take a very long time to consume.

The building depreciates and eventually is worth zilch unless you spend to keep its value (maintenance), but the land where the building stands is not a consumable.

> Making it appreciate is very problematic.

nobody is "making it appreciate" - it's a natural consequence of people desiring a home, and the supply not keeping up (whether by physical constraints, or by political/policy constraints).

> nobody is "making it appreciate"

> political/policy constraints

You just found exactly who is making it appreciate

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