You are of course not wholly wrong. However, people paying on the latter half of a 30 year mortgage are almost certainly paying much less for housing than they would be paying to lease, due to inflation. And of course these payments are increasingly equity-weighted.

Just because a mortgage is a liability doesn't mean it's a bad financial decision to incur a mortgage to own a house, agreed.

I think it’s going to be futile to argue with you (partially because you’re correct in the technical sense) but I’ll give it one shot.

Imagine you have 20 million. Should you buy a million dollar house outright, or get a mortgage? Look at the prime rate today and compare it with expected market returns over the life of a mortgage.

This is without even considering the ground reality of renting a place (which is the common alternative), where rents are liable to rise perpetually, and without considering a plethora of other factors which contribute to calling a mortgage an asset.

Of course, if you can get by without needing to pay for shelter at all, you should do that.

A better way to describe that is that buying a house with a mortgage is a leveraged investment.

The mortgage is the opposite of an asset.

The whole point of accounting is to force black and white distinctions, especially in ambiguous situations. But in fact there is no ambiguity about this. Owing someone money doesn't earn you money. Owning an asset that you may have acquired with a loan is what earns you money.

I totally agree. I'm making the narrow point that a mortgage is a debt, and classified as a liability. A house is an asset. The benefit of purchasing real estate with leverage vs cash doesn't change how they sit on a balance sheet.

Personally I argue to everyone they should put down as little as possible for the reasons you're stating.