Joseph Moore

All American homes were investments for most of history.

For one thing, most of those homes were farms.

They were, by definition, income producing.

So Americans saw homeownership, land ownership, as their ticket out of poverty and into what we would call the middle class.

So I actually think it's a pretty good investment class, but I have actually told some young people, you may do better to rent your own home, but invest in someone else's because the real payouts for real estate are you're shorting the dollar.

That's essentially what you're doing is saying, I'm going to buy an asset and I'm going to bet that the US dollar is going to lose two to three to 4% of its value every year.

And that asset is going to go up.

Meanwhile, it's not only a short on the dollar, it's a leveraged short on the dollar because you can buy it 5, 10, 15 cents down for every dollar you're borrowing.

And the great American mortgage, the 30 year amortized mortgage is probably the most amazing financial product in the history of the country.

and it's a it's a financial invention other countries envy and wish they could get so americans are able to to borrow you know say if you put a 20 down payment you're borrowing 80 cents to your 20 cents and if the thing goes up then you're leveraged against the short on the dollar which i know we're getting kind of technical there but if i went to the stock market and said i'd like you to lend me that kind of money they call me crazy

I mean, you'd have to go to the Chicago Board of Trade to get that kind of leverage.

And even then, you'd have to already kind of be rich for them to let you borrow that kind of money to invest in.

So as an investment, it can be powerful.

It can build wealth over time.

But as a strategy for where you live, renting is often the better choice.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of this is also regional.

We forget how big the United States is as a country, right?

Like if you're, if you live most of your life in one metropolitan area and some of this can be, can vary wildly.

So for people in California, it's a very different experience than say Austin, Texas right now.