The home is not the investment, the land is. Land is scarce, especially in desirable places. The home itself does depreciate and frequently drags down the price of the property, with new owners often tearing the place to the ground after purchase.

Renters do not pay for everything. Ask any financial advisor and they will tell you it is cheaper to rent than to own. It’s a very common strategy to rent, then take the extra money you save and invest it into stocks and bonds for retirement. In the long run, if your investments match the S&P 500 (not hard to do with index funds) then you’ll have more money than you would have if you bought a home (at national average real estate growth rates anyway).

You might point to some place like San Francisco and claim the people who bought houses there back in the 1990s beat the market. Sure, but that’s the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. You could just as easily have bought a house in Detroit instead. I would also say you could play the same game about picking stocks after the fact, but that would be beating a dead horse.

So why do people buy houses if they’re a bad investment compared to stocks? Emotional value, mainly. Having a place to call your own is important to a lot of people.

Yes. Think of raw garlic like a spice but cooked garlic like a vegetable. Same thing works for onions!

Clearly they mean: toss the egg in a bowl of Frootloops!

Definitely check out Link’s Awakening when you get a chance! It has a really cool mechanical evolution beyond LttP: you have 2 equipment slots that you can swap independently! So instead of always having the sword + 1 item, you can have 2 different items with no sword!