"The old Wall Street adage "never invest in anything that eats or needs repairs" may apply to racehorses, but it's malarkey when it comes to houses."

Making a decision to own a house that is too expensive in lieu of starting an investment portfolio impacts an individual in at least the following three ways: 1.​Loss of time, during which other assets could have grown in value. 2.​Loss of additional capital, which could have been invested instead of paying high home maintenance expenses. 3.​Loss of education. Too often, people count their house and savings and retirement plans as all they have in their asset column. Because they have no money to invest, they simply don’t invest. This costs them investment experience. Most never become what the investment world calls “a sophisticated investor.” And the best investments are usually first sold to sophisticated investors, who then turn around and sell them to the people playing it safe.

New houses, which are crap, because they don’t build them the way they used to anymore. Old houses, which used to be good, because they were built back when they built them the way they used to, but which today, as a result of being old, are crap. So whichever kind of house you own, it’s going to be some variety of crap, which means sooner or later everything in it will break. Dealing with broken things is the essence of home ownership, and it’s exhausting.

In the face of the things like the , the scare, the , and other disasters that eroded the notional value of financial paper, homeownership itself was now turned into a magical generator of unearned riches for both borrowers and lenders. It was consistent with the Las Vegas-ization of the national moral sense, chiefly the increasingly popular belief at every level of American life that it really was possible to get something for nothing. Anyone could see this in the easy public acceptance of gambling as okay and the proliferation of casinos everywhere in the land. Not even the evangelical Christians seemed to mind. There is no such thing as intrinsic value in a house. A huge percentage of the public has now put its net worth into something that… isn't an investment. Apart from false econometrics of rising house valuations and the leverage that affords for raising cash within the context of the current lending rackets, a house is much more of a consumer product than an investment, especially the kind of houses built in recent decades in America, namely stapled-together boxes made of particle board and plastic cladding that require continual reinvestment in petty cash and labor for upkeep, and will probably not hold their value, even if well cared for, because of poor locational choices. A house on a one-acre lot in a subdivision in , thirty-two miles from downtown Washington, […] a magnificent thing to behold today, with a soaring lawyer foyer entrance, a restaurant-grade kitchen, and an inground pool out back. But if there is less gasoline to power up the fleet of cars necessary to service it, and no natural gas to heat the thousand-square-foot cathedral-ceilinged lawyer foyer, then chances are that the house is going to be a liability rather than an asset.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

When building a portfolio of investments that can have non-linear outcomes, never sell early.

You may be right most of the time, but the one time you’re wrong will cost you most of the returns.

Houses, like stocks, are most likely to be profitable when they’re held for a long period of time. Unlike stocks, houses are likely to be owned by the same person for a number of years — seven, I think, is the average. Compare this to the

The investor would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: "Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop".

Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.

The house is a place where things can go wrong.

I’d always kept an eye on the house. I don’t mean doing repairs, for as the house didn’t belong to me that was not my place, but rather I’d keep watch over its decline.

A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.

Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible... one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry.

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.