[Porsche-O-Phile]

If you can afford a traditional 20% down payment on a property (most people can't now) and get a 30-year-fixed loan only, I'd say it's worth considering. With any other type of loan (particularly I/O), you're throwing away your equity-building ability and you won't see any real tax benefit - at least that's the way it came out when I ran these numbers a few months ago. Yes, you deduct from federal taxes, but state/local property taxes make it almost a zero-sum game. Add HOA fees, maintenance costs, etc. to that and it's actually easy to end up in the hole.

My $0.02 is to stay far, far away from residential RE for at least a couple of years until all the poison in the system has had a chance to flush itself out.



The one I also come back to (and I haven't heard a good counter to yet) is - for a particular piece of property, why buy it at 1.5-3x (depending) the rate of renting it just to "buy" it, when I can rent it and take the difference in $$$, put it into stocks, mutuals, futures or options and make 10x the rate of return I'd get on residential RE right now - and that assumes you're exceptionally lucky in RE and don't lose (which is a distinct possibility).

Another thing to consider is that I believe there are options-on-futures for residential RE that are going to be coming out soon. I'll be buying a ton of "put" options on those.