I can never seem to wrap my head around what you do with money once it is invested, for example if you have 500k in a brokerage account, what are you supposed to ultimately do with it? If you decide to cash out one day wouldn't you have to do it over a decade in order to minimize capital gains taxes? If you decided to buy a house for 500k and had to sell all your stocks and pay the 500k outright you wouldn't be able to because you would then have to pay taxes on your capital gains (say its 250k realized) which would mean you would owe a shit ton of taxes. Can someone explain how you are supposed to ever actually use the money? Also it doesn't make any sense to me to loan against your investments because most brokerage interest rates are 8-10% anyway, so it never would make sense to do that because that is higher then a mortgage rate and or personnel loan anyway. Thanks for any advice or explanations, this is coming up because I am almost at the time that I would like to buy a house. EDIT: the 500k is just an example number