A lot of people will tell you that buying a home is a good investment, but “that couldn’t be further from the truth,” says

Peter Mallouk (of wealth management firm Creative Planning) and Ramit Sethi (author of I Will Teach You to be Rich (2009)) on why buying a home isn’t a good investment:

At the end of the day, owning a home takes money out of your pocket: “You’re paying property taxes, you’re paying maintenance, you’re paying insurance. There are all of these other things that happen with your home that you’ve got to pay for.”

Over time, your home might increase in value, Mallouk says, but it probably won’t appreciate enough to offset all of the costs. Instead, if you took what you’d save from not buying a house and invested it in something that’s likely to grow in value, such as stocks and bonds, chances are you’d end up with more money in the long term.

Ramit Sethi, self-made millionaire and author of “I Will Teach You to be Rich,” has made the same argument. Think about it this way, Sethi suggests: “Generally we can assume that over the long term, if we invest in a low-cost diversified index fund, we get about 7%” in terms of annualized returns. “Can you beat that in your area, over time, with real estate appreciation?”