what are they (millennials) doing instead to accumulate wealth?

 If millennials aren't buying homes, what are they doing instead to accumulate wealth?

 MILLENNIAL is a person born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s; a member of Generation Y.

The wealth that we accumulate by owning a house may be somewhat illusory. We bought a house in 2004 and have paid it off now, and it is almost exactly doubled in value. Wow, big gains.

Yes. But…first of all the sticker price that we paid is not what we *actually* paid. We paid interest for those 14 years. We got a tax deduction but we also paid taxes. I don’t even know how to calculate how that adds up. We also spent money on repairs, upkeep, and improvements.

And we got to live here.

But if we sell it (the only way to realize those gains), then what? Where do we live? All the other houses also doubled in price. Our proceeds from the sale would have a sales commission subtracted, and at 6 or even 3%, that’s a big amount! In order to take the money and live off of it, we would have to move to a much less expensive place.

Who will actually get this accumulated wealth? When we die, our daughter will get a nice sum. But in the meantime—not so easy to say if we have “accumulated wealth.”

(We do get to live rent-free from now on, just paying taxes and upkeep. That’s nice in retirement!)

Homeownership doesn't build wealth, study finds ( read here )

And of course, if it had been necessary for us to sell in 2009 or 2010, we could have *lost* money. In fact, we managed to do exactly that ourselves back in the early 1990s. Bought a condo for $100,000, the LA riots happened in 1992, and when we sold it in 2007, it sold for $48,000 in a short sale. That unit is back up to something like $300,000 now. But that water went under the bridge a long while past!