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http://www.prosper.org.au/progresspdf/Progress1056_JulAug2003.pdf

The Homeownership Cycle
by Ed Dodson
The cycle is something like:

1. Reach an age when you are working full-time;
2. Either lease an apartment and save very little, or continue to live with parents and pay them as little as possible;
3. Link up with some "significant other" and save for your starter home (e.g., a townhome, a small single-family detached house, or maybe a manufactured housing unit);
4. Depend on land prices going up so you can sell the property for more than you paid for it;
5. Appreciation and amortization combine to create "equity" that you can transfer to a larger and/or more amenity-rich property (which will tend to appreciate in value in faster and higher over time);
6. Do this two, three, four, or five times in your working life, perhaps moving from a high housing cost area to a low housing cost area and investing your profits in mutual funds or shares of stock;
7. If you have children, be prepared to cash in all of your investments and take a second mortgage out on your current home in order to pay for them to attend the best college your debt load can afford;
8. After your children’s educations are paid for begin to think about retirement;
9. Stay in your home through one more rising housing cycle, then sell out as near the top as you can guess is the top;
10. Lease an apartment (putting most of your possessions into storage) until the housing market crashes;
11. Purchase a townhome that some younger homeowners have moved out of because their dot.com employers went bust, they defaulted on their mortgage and the bank is selling the property for what it can get;
12. Enjoy your retirement years without having a long list of household chores every week;
13. When you start to run out of money, hopefully the housing cycle will be on the upswing again and you can get a monthly income supplement by taking out a reverse mortgage;
14. Don't worry about leaving your children anything of consequence; they will only fight over your few remaining possessions anyway.

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... because democracy alone hasn't yet led to a society in which all can prosper