Here's the thing about housing: if you rented all your adult life, as I pretty much have, you have no paid off home to possibly sell and provide you the means to move to a cheaper place to live in retirement. I wish someone had advised me on this aspect of the life cycle.

I'm not sure that when folks talk about home owning as wealth building that they mean everyone passes down their home to their kids. Even so, when my parents died, my brother and I spent a few thousand dollars to fix up the house we grew up in and sold it for $120,000 (small suburb outside Buffalo), so we inherited $60k each. I was able to pay off student loans from a career change. Tell me how that would have worked if my parents rented all their lives?