50% of American Houses Dropped in Price

Pay attention to the news. More than half of all homes in America went down in value in the last 12 months. Does that mean you should never buy a house? No. But if you're buying a house because you think, wow, this is the surest way to gain wealth, you are mistaken. House prices go up and they go down. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. So this is a bit of a pet peeve of my full disclosure. I do own a house, and my pet peeve is not that housing prices went down this year. They do all the time, and nobody talks about it. You never go to a cocktail party and someone says, wow, I just did this real estate deal, I sold my house, and wow, what do you know? I lost $10,000. I lost $100,000. People don't like to brag about. Everyone likes to talk about how smart they are. They doubled their money, they tripled their money. They never really factor in all expenses or what their true costs were or what their same amount of money would have done if they put it into an index fund and rent it.