For many folks, their home is their only investment or a majority of it - for many, they think about the equity that it gains as a form of retirement financing - be that selling it for a hefty profit, holding it as a rental and thus creating a monthly income flow, or to even borrow against it in the form of a Home Equity line of some sort, including a reverse mortgage.

In our generation, we often bought one home and then sold it to buy or build another and then repeated the process. Each time, we sold the 1st home at a good to even GREAT added value to help help pay for the next. We were encouraged to do this by our tax laws -

Our local governments also encouraged it because the more the assessed value, the more they can get from property taxes so for sure they want higher value housing to real this reward for all their citizens.

Equity is built by sales - whether the sales are of new homes or existing one - as long as there is no adverse conditions, as the sales increase in value, our home is worth more and we have taken advantage of this throughout our lifetime.

Even if we don't make it to cash in the value-gained, our heirs can take advantage of what we may have missed out of if they are wise in their decision-making. So for many people, the home is a way to pass along wealth from one generation to the next.

Now the real reason, why I am mentioning this is because Housing has gotten to be an affordability problem for the current home-buying generations - be it their 1st home or one they were planning on buying from their equity in the current one.

Haven't we all played a part in this housing affordability? Yep, we have and now we are reaping some of the unintended consequences - So think about this when we begin to talk about any solutions.