“Most people never really buy a home at all ... they buy a mortgage.”
Most people are idiots. Most are economically illiterate. Something like 50% of credit card holders have debt of $15K or greater on their credit cards. People know nothing about interest and don’t bother to learn.
Go to any web site that amortizes mortgages, and compare the total interest costs on a $120K loan over 10 years, 15 years, 20 years and 30 years. It becomes painfully obvious that a 30 year loan is a bad idea for most circumstances.
Any of those web sites will allow you to see how much you pay down the principle during the first 3 or 5 years of a 30 year loan - virtually none. Yet I’ve talked to many homeowners who don’t know that.
The fact that many people are financially stupid does not make credit cards or home debt bad. I pay my credit card every month and get percentage of reward back on my purchases. For me, a credit card is better than cash. For others, it is pure trouble. It is the person at fault, not the system.
“After less than nine years I was able to sell my house and walk away with enough cash to buy a retirement house in Arizona for cash.”
Yep. Buy a house with a 15 year mortgage and stay in it 9 years, and it is entirely possible to do very well. Do it a couple of times over your life, and it is entirely possible to pay cash for a house and live in it with only property taxes hanging over your head. But renters pay property taxes too...they just don’t know it because it is part of their rent.
I won't call you an idiot or economically illiterate, but I'll suggest a different approach. Take your own circumstances and see if this would work better for you:
1. Buy a home, and calculate the difference between the monthly payment on a 15-year mortgage and the monthly payment on a 30-year mortgage. We'll call this figure X.
2. Sign a 30-year mortgage on the home, and make regular monthly payments on it.
3. Take the difference between the two mortgage payments every month (X) and invest it in a diversified portfolio of investments that lean toward conservative (a mix of stocks and bonds, but stocks should be concentrated in index funds).
4. At the end of the nine years you described, your mortgage will have a balance that we'll call Y. Your investments will have a balance that we'll call X'.
The advantage of this approach is that after the nine years are up, you now have the flexibility to do a lot of different things -- like selling the home, refinancing the mortgage for another 30 years, taking some or all of your X' and making a lump-sum payment against the principle, etc. I'd recommend refinancing for another 30 years, because you can then start the whole process all over again -- and your new X will be higher because your monthly mortgage payments will likely be lower.
Give it a shot on paper and see how it works for you. You should also take into account the tax deductibility of your mortgage interest payments, which basically means that you're borrowing money at a preferred (and effective subsidized) interest rate to finance your investments of X.