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The general advice is that if you're actively shopping for a home most or all of your down payment should be in cash or very low-risk securities.

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Sure, but "actively shopping for a home" is different from "waiting for prices to fall so you can afford one". If you'd kept your down payment in cash since the last housing bottom a decade ago, you'd have missed out on ~3x appreciation vs. putting it in an index fund.

and we'd likely have a healthy housing market if more people were rational like this.

But no, let's take a loan out against our RSU's so we can get a $1M bi-level because the schools in this district are amazing /s. Now a house in North Carolina is worth as much as one in New Jersey.

Given the choice, I would much rather live in North Carolina than New Jersey so that makes sense. Everyone I know who lived in Jersey at any point lived there because they had to, or because they were already established. Not because all things being equal they would choose to be there.

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