Washington Post: Americans think owning a home is better for them than it is

09 Feb Washington Post: Americans think owning a home is better for them than it is

Some people never learn: Polls show that Americans still view their homes as the best and safest place to invest their hard-earned cash.

Gallup asked Americans this month to choose the best “long-term investment.” Real estate was the most common pick, ahead of mutual funds, bonds and other options. Similarly, Fannie Mae’s National Housing Survey asked Americans to assess whether various kinds of assets amounted to a “safe investment with a lot of potential.” As has been the case since before the financial crisis, “buying a home” beat out all the alternatives.

The fact that Americans still financially fetishize homeownership baffles me. Never mind that so many people lost their shirts (among other possessions) in the recent housing bust. Over an even longer horizon, owning a home has not proved to be a terribly lucrative investment either. Don’t take my word for it; ask Robert Shiller, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in economics who previously became a household name for identifying the housing bubble.

“People forget that housing deteriorates over time. It goes out of style. There are new innovations that people want, different layouts of rooms,” he told me. “And technological progress keeps bringing the cost of construction down.” Meaning your worn, old-fashioned home is competing with new, relatively inexpensive ones.

Over the past century, housing prices have grown at a compound annual rate of just 0.3 percent once one adjusts for inflation, according to my calculations using Shiller’s historical housing data. Over the same period, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has had comparable annual returns of about 6.5 percent.

Yet Americans still think it’s financially savvy to dump all their savings into a single, large, highly illiquid asset.

Perhaps Americans just want to invest in something tangible. Real estate is, after all, real: bricks, mortar, wood, tile. Other kinds of assets seem more abstract, almost imaginary, by comparison. You just have to trust your financial adviser, bank or never-ending, entire-rainforest-killing Vanguard mailings that your other investments actually exist.

Shiller suspects that selective memory may also play a role. Continue reading > > >
Via Washington Post