Missed out an important bit.
You're house you paid £100,000 for could easily be worth £140-£180,000 if you hold on to it for 15 years.
So you could easily have doubled you money. I agree with you general point though better investments available.
Could is the operative word
It could also be worth £70k.
Depends when you bought it and the state of the economy.
If you hold onto it for long enough it'll go up. Like 50 years.
15 years, probably, but it's not necessarily going to double in value, and you have to take inflation into account. If it's worth £140k in 20 years, then that's not like £140k in today's money.
Property really isn't a good investment.
If you invested £100k into the stockmarket over 20 years and compounded it. Which means, you just keep it there. Your $100k would be worth £732k in 20 years at the 10% return average. Even at 7% it would be worth £404k
If you invested the £100k into the stockmarket, and instead of an average of say £50/mo in costs to maintain your property, you put that into the stockmarket, then in 20 years you would have :-
£771k
If you invested £200/mo for 20 years into the stockmarket on top of that your net worth would be £886k.
If you want £1.5 mil, then invest £100k and £1000/mo for 20 years and you'll have £1.5mil in 20 years.
Pretty fucking simple. Most people don't do it. They spend their money on utter crap, or a fucking house.
A house a LIABILITY!
But people want "security" so the feeling of "owning" a home gives them that, when in reality, it's not security, since you can go and get a roof over your head for very little rent if you'd just not been over-spending your entire life and had put the money in the stockmarket instead of the bank.
This is just following an index. Not any fancy investing, which is pointless anyway. The best investors in the world only make 20% over a long period. But 20% is fucking huge. If you can make 20% over 20 years your £100k + £1k/mo will be worth £8.5 million. If you can invest £5k/mo on top of that, you'll be worth £21 million!
Make it an initial £500k and £15k/mo for 20 years and you're worth £74 million in 20 years.
