17.2 How households supply financial capital  (Page 8/43)

The bottom line on investing in mutual funds is that the rate of return over time will be high; the risks are also high, but the risks and returns for an individual mutual fund will be lower than those for an individual stock. As with stocks, liquidity is also high provided the mutual fund or stock index fund is readily traded.

Housing and other tangible assets

Households can also seek a rate of return by purchasing tangible assets, especially housing. About two-thirds of U.S. households own their own home. An owner’s equity    in a house is the monetary value the owner would have after selling the house and repaying any outstanding bank loans used to buy the house. For example, imagine that you buy a house for $200,000, paying 10% of the price as a down payment and taking out a bank loan for the remaining $180,000. Over time, you pay off some of your bank loan, so that only $100,000 remains, and the value of the house on the market rises to $250,000. At that point, your equity in the home is the value of the home minus the value of the loan outstanding, which is $150,000. For many middle-class Americans, home equity is their single greatest financial asset. The total value of all home equity held by U.S. households was $11.3 trillion at the end of 2015, according to Federal Reserve Data.

Investment in a house is tangibly different from bank accounts, stocks, and bonds because a house offers both a financial and a nonfinancial return. If you buy a house to live in, part of the return on your investment occurs from your consumption of “housing services”—that is, having a place to live. (Of course, if you buy a home and rent it out, you receive rental payments for the housing services you provide, which would offer a financial return.) Buying a house to live in also offers the possibility of a capital gain from selling the house in the future for more than you paid for it. There can, however, be different outcomes, as the Clear It Up on the housing market shows.

Housing prices have usually risen steadily over time; for example, the median sales price for an existing one-family home was $122,900 in 1990, but $294,000 in 2015. Over these 23 years, home prices increased an average of 3.1% per year, which is an average financial return over this time. [link] shows U.S. Census data for the median average sales price of a house in the United States over this time period.

However, the possible capital gains from rising housing prices are riskier than these national price averages. Certain regions of the country or metropolitan areas have seen drops in housing prices over time. The median housing price for the United States as a whole fell almost 7% in 2008 and again in 2009, dropping the median price from $247,900 to $216,700. As of 2015, home values had almost recovered to their pre-recession levels.