On the real estate vs. stock investments question, I will share the insight I got from a very unusual source years ago.
I worked in the aerospace industry, and when the Soviet Union fell, the company established contacts there, and I traveled to Russia to buy technology. Before I went I took a course in understanding the Russians.
One of the questions that came up was "how did the Soviets keep their people in such miserable living conditions for so long?" The instructor answered that by introducing the concept of "relative well-being". Essentially if you have the same, or even slightly better, standard of living as the people around you, you do not feel deprived. The way I applied this to retirement was to notice that in good times or bad, a home rents for about 1/3 of a family's income. So, if I DW and I owned 3 homes outright when we retired, we would be just about as well off as the average person in our community. Now, there is maintenance and repairs, so we probably needed 4 instead of just three, but no matter what happens with inflation, deflation, boom or depression, we are going to be financially in as good a shape as average if we have those 4 houses.
Now, throw in our pensions, some Social Security, and a little bit of a 401 (k), and we will be doing better than average.
As far as the issue of real estate appreciation vs, stock appreciation goes, real estate doesn't goes up as fast as as stocks, but if I borrow money to buy stock and the stock goes down, they will call the loan and bankrupt me. OTOH, I can borrow money to buy real estate and if the value of the house drops, they can't call the loan. And if my equity is something like 25%, and the whole house goes up with inflation, my equity goes up 4 times as fast as inflation.
There are two other advantages to real estate. One is that I am master of my own destiny to a much greater extent than with stock. DW and I could improve the property with out own labor and a minimum of materials. Plus we were spending time together and strengthening our relationship, working for a common goal. Go ahead, try that with stocks, you will discover that no matter how good your market research, the chairman of GM just doesn't want to hear your advice.
The other advantage of real estate is that it is not very liquid. Getting your money out is a big deal that takes months of planning. You don't sell it on a whim, and you can't sell off small chunks to buy a car or something.
Right now, I am expecting a pretty fair amount of inflation over the next few years. You can go back to the time of the Romans, and see that increased government spending has always led to inflation. Oh, the Romans didn't call it that, they called it "debasing the currency", but coins that started out as pure gold only had a few percent gold in them toward the end, and that is exactly the same thing as inflation.
Right now, we don't have any fully-paid real estate, but we do have enough equity to give us the equivalent of 4 paid off small houses. If inflation kicks off, I would rather owe money than not, and when the real estate market improves, we can sell out and pay down mortgages to get into a paid up position.
