But I don’t consider a personal home an investment, believe it or not, unless I plan to leverage some of the equity into real estate that WILL be an investment. But that’s the only time. Otherwise, the personal home is something else entirely–to me, it says “I will have a place to live no matter what.” Unless you live somewhere expensive like NYC or the major metropolitan areas of California, you will never pay as much in property taxes annually as you would in rent *or* mortgage. That means that, outside of the government exercising eminent domain or your home being destroyed, you will never lose it. (And you’d still own the land even if the house were carried away in a tornado!)

No amount of stock or bonds can buy that security. Wall Street is not a residential property.

But it’s like savings accounts. A lot of times I see PF writers (bloggers or not) pushing people away from savings accounts because the return is so abysmal. Well, a savings account isn’t an investment vehicle either! It is also a security measure; this is where you put emergency funds in case you lose your principal source of income. You don’t want to put your emergency funds someplace where there will be any delay whatsoever in getting the funds out and putting them to use. That rules out every investment vehicle there is except money market funds. Money market funds don’t do much better in terms of interest rates than savings accounts do, and they require a higher initial deposit and a higher daily balance besides. Not good for someone just starting out with an e-fund.

When we speak of and write about financial issues it’s important to look at the issue for what it is, consider what it’s designed to do and give advice from that perspective. You can’t just lump a whole bunch of entities together because they look sort of alike and give overgeneralized advice. This is how people get into trouble.