Run From the 50-Year Mortgage As Fast As You Can

When Zoomers dunk on Boomers, it’s a lot of internet theater, cheap shots, and memes. Some of it is fair game, and some isn’t. When it comes to the issue of housing, I’m quite sympathetic to the Zoomers’ position—they’re not wrong. This is messed up.

For my parents’ generation, a starter home was… a starter home. It was modest, simple, and gave you room to grow as a new family. For younger Americans, the idea of owning anything with four walls and a roof feels like a cruel joke. That’s the kind of anger that powers “burn it all down” politics and makes proposals like a 50-year mortgage sound like part-salvation, part-slap-in-the-face.

Yes, a 50-year mortgage. That’s what it has come to. Not a shock, about half of Americans would consider taking on a 50-year mortgage if it meant they could have a house.

Don’t do it. The math on a 50-year mortgage is downright ugly.

We Turned Homes Into Lottery Tickets

Let’s start with what the 50-year mortgage is supposed to do…

LOWER YOUR MONTHLY PAYMENT!

Take a house around the median national price of $415,000. Put 20% down and borrow the rest at 6.3%. On a 30-year fixed, your principal and interest run about $2,050 a month.

Stretch that same loan to 50 years, and the payment falls to roughly $1,820.

So you “save” about $230 a month… by staying in debt 20 extra years and paying about 40% more in total interest. I promise you that it is not a deal worth taking.

Here’s the kicker: because the term is so long, your early payments hardly touch the principal. On a 30-year mortgage, the first decade is already brutal. You send the bank a huge check every month and watch your balance crawl down by inches. Over 50 years, that crawl becomes a slow melt. It can take decades before you’re paying more toward principal than interest.

It is my sincere belief that most young homeowners don’t actually understand what the loan officer is saying when they briskly explain this to them… Many nod, smile, and sign. They want a house.

In practice, a 50-year mortgage is almost an interest-only loan in disguise. The only way that makes sense is if home prices keep ripping higher forever. That’s not a wealth-building investment. It’s a big, risky bet that the bubble won’t pop. It’s a lottery ticket. Not many people win.

Check out my video on this for a little history lesson on American housing.

Why a 50-Year Mortgage Won’t Save You

Let’s do another round of numbers, just to paint a picture. Imagine buying a $400,000 house with $80,000 down. Your initial equity is that $80,000. If the house goes up 10% in value, to $440,000, and you’ve chipped away a little bit of principal, your equity might jump from $80,000 to around $130,000.

The house only went up 10%. Your equity went up more than 60%. Cha-ching.

That’s the magic of leverage on the way up. It’s also why Boomers and Gen Xers who bought earlier feel like geniuses. They rode a decades-long wave of easy credit and rising prices. They’re able to look down on everyone as if they’re financial wizards… because the system simply worked for them.

Flip it around now.

Suppose prices fall 10%. That same leverage can wipe out most or all of your equity, especially if you bought recently with a small down payment. Suddenly, you owe more than the house is worth. Now you’re stuck.

A 50-year mortgage cranks up the fragility. You build equity painfully slowly unless price appreciation bails you out. If prices flatten or back off even a bit, you’re just renting money from a bank for half a century.

I’m generally against raising taxes, but if you care about generational fairness, ending the mortgage interest deduction should be on the table. It would hit people like me—older, established homeowners—far more than young renters. It would cool prices and reduce the incentives for overleveraged the housing markets.

This has turned into generational warfare, and we have to consider the possibility that the older folks are not doing their duty to pave the road for younger generations.

Now, if the game is this utterly rigged, what can you actually do?

Three Moves You Can Make Right Now

You can’t personally unwind Fannie Mae or rewrite the tax code. But you’re not powerless either. There are ways to navigate this mess more intelligently.

1) Be the “fixer-upper” person, not the granite-countertops person.

Most buyers shop with their eyes and their feelings. They want to walk into a place that looks like an HGTV reveal: fresh paint, open floor plan, shiny kitchen. If the house smells weird, has ugly carpet, or needs obvious repairs, many people run.

That’s your opportunity.

When my family bought in New Jersey, just outside of NYC, we deliberately looked for properties that needed work. The only way to make the numbers make sense was to buy places other people ignored and add value ourselves.

You don’t have to be a master carpenter. You just need vision and a willingness to learn. Paint, flooring, basic kitchen and bath upgrades, landscaping—these are all areas where sweat equity can turn a “no way” listing into a real asset. It’s not glamorous. It’s not instant. But it’s a path into ownership that doesn’t rely on catching the perfect interest rate at the perfect time.

2) Widen your circle on the map. A lot.

One of the biggest levers you control is where you live.

Leaving the New York metro area for Austin was a huge decision for my family. It meant leaving friends, routines, and familiarity behind. But there are metros where you don’t have to drive an hour and a half to go from “totally unaffordable” to “barely doable.” In some cities, a 15-minute drive from the center cuts the price dramatically. Go 30 minutes, and you might find similar prices plus some land.

LAND! Can you imagine?

Sure, this isn’t fair. You shouldn’t have to move away from your parents or your support network to afford a house. But in a distorted system, mobility is one of the strongest tools you have. Take what resources you have and walk.

Even if you don’t move states, being willing to cross a county line or live on the “wrong” side of town can mean the difference between renting forever and owning something imperfect that you can improve.

3) Start small, cheap, and broken.

If you’re waiting for your dream house, you’re going to be waiting a long time. The American dream doesn’t have to start with a three-bed, two-bath with a fenced yard and a finished basement.

Think in stages. Your first place doesn’t need to be your “forever home.” It can be a condo, a duplex, a tiny house on the edge of town, something unloved that you can afford without overstretching. The goal is to get some skin in the game without betting your entire future on nonstop price appreciation.

Starting small also gives you room to make mistakes. You’ll learn what repairs actually cost, how property taxes really work, what you value in a neighborhood, and how much house you actually need. (Spoiler: most of us don’t need as much as the home-builder marketing departments say we do.)

We absolutely should fight to unwind the worst parts of this system: the perverse incentives, the subsidies that inflate prices, the zoning rules that make modest homes illegal to build. That work matters. But while we push for those changes, you still have a life to live.

If you’re young and furious about housing, I get it. The anger is justified. Just don’t let it turn into fatalism. Learn the math of mortgages. Understand leverage. Look where other people refuse to look. Consider moving a little further than is comfortable. Be willing to start smaller and messier than you imagined.

Turn off “Selling Sunset.” That’s not the real world for 99% of people.

We may not be able to fix the system overnight. But you can refuse to play the 50-year game—and you can still carve out a place to call your own.