bought our three-story house, it cost $271,000. By early 2007, the house reached a peak value of $625,000. The entire ride up my family refinanced the mortgage over and over, extracting increasing amounts of home equity. We could keep living high off of this equity as long as house prices kept going up. Unfortunately, they didn’t. As house prices started to crash in late 2007, everything came undone. We lost the house and were forced to sell the dune buggy, the TV, and the sports car. The Gates we once called home were now a barrier to a life that was no longer ours. We weren’t rich after all.
