I've only been involved in the purchase of one house in my life (so far), but the whole process has always kind of felt like a shell game to me. Especially if you have a previous house that you don't own outright. I was actually just thinking about this the other day on my drive in to work. How things have to fall into place perfectly for the sale of your old house to become the down payment for your new one and how so many different things could go wrong in that whole process and screw you over. It's just pretty crazy to me. It's so much debt just shifting from one place to another, but never going away.