Overall, I'm thinking this could go either way depending on your priorities and preferred lifestyle. But one more thing you can do with the equity Philip (if you're comfortable with this and are extremely savvy about finding the right opportunities, that is) is leverage it for a hard money lending opportunity and make your money on the point spread. This would definitely put it into the income producing asset category that the other person was commenting on. We've been doing hard money lending a bit in the last couple of years. We're still learning, so we haven't used equity for it yet. However, we can both see a time in the relatively near future when we will feel secure enough with our skill set and range of opportunities to go ahead and do the point spread investment thing.

Not everyone is comfortable with this, and it's far from standard advice, so it's definitely not something you would want to jump into without lots of security, information, and backup. But it is an option.

Also, what about basement, garage and attic apartments as additional income streams for a house / asset? No one has really mentioned that yet. I'm not saying you're wrong about your renting thing, though. If you are not comfortable with certain situations and strategies for home use, than renting can be better for your particular situation. Some people value their independence in decisions more, while other people value the mobility and lack of owner responsibility more. Just depends what you want. Hope these comments are of help to people.

Great choice of topic, as usual. Very interesting conversation going on here. Lots of great points.