Jim Henderson wrote:

 
>>> But one other thing that's fairly common is to buy a house and let the
>>> value increase - and then sell it for the increased value and roll that
>>> over into another house.  If one is smart about it, one can make a
>>> pretty decent amount of money doing that through "trading up" like
>>> that.  It's rare at least here for anyone to live in the same house
>>> long enough to pay off a 30 year mortgage.
>> 
>> ...which brings us back to my point of "if your house burns down, you
>> now have an extremely serious financial problem". ;-)
> 
> And that brings me back to "that's what homeowner's insurance is for". ;-)

My brother's father in law made an insane amount of money this way. But you 
have to be quite careful (at least "this side of the pond") - quite a few 
folks have gone bankrupt trying to do this here, and then find out when the 
economy takes a dip they can't keep all those mortgages covered, and they 
can't squeeze enough out of their renters.

-- 
Stefan Viljoen

Post a reply to this message