The interesting thing about buying a house for me was that it capped my monthly housing expense. Rents can go up, you can get evicted, you can have your house burned down by your neighbor. Owning a house allowed me to plot a lifetime expense versus my retirement savings. Generally I worked backward from 70 which was the point at which I got maximum Social security to what ever was the current present, and then looked at an annualized model of costs from there to the present. Once I had the model I could plot my earliest retirement date backward from 70 as time passed. Sort of like the two trains leave the station, where will they meet.<p>The only reason I bought the house was that my need to live somewhere was a given, and owning removed a host of variables from my model which were hard to predict. Rather than thinking of it as an investment it acted more like a cost shield which meant as my income grew all of the additional growth could go into retirement rather than being allocated to higher housing costs.