Your House is NOT a ticket to wealth

@MarketWatch points out “7 reasons why you shouldn’t fear a market crash” by @TonyRobbins.

Namely: you need to be in the market to have a chance of winning.

Unfortunately, so many people never get started in the market because of fear of loss.

In his excellent book, Unshakeable: Your Financial Freedom Playbook, Tony helps people get comfortable with the market as a means to building financial independence.

Tony gives many great pieces of advice in the book, but, as far as I remember from my reading of it, “buying a house” was never once recommended as a necessary step on the yellow brick road to financial freedom.

So many people blindly enter the housing market – and strap themselves to life of servitude upon buying a house - but never get invested in the market. While building assets is an important component to building wealth, buying a house is NOT.

People buy a house thinking they anyhow need a place to live, but don’t realize that:

a) Houses are more expensive than they realize

b) Houses appreciate less then they think

c) Their money can do better applied elsewhere

We may associate a house with wealth – or, better said: “wealthy people;” but a house is not the means to the wealth.

You might accumulate some equity in buying a house, as you would in a piggy bank, but you also take on expensive obligations to maintenance and property taxes.

Fortunately, you can Rent Your Way To Freedom at the same time you build your assets in the market, as people like Tony Robbins recommend.