It's true, and this is definitely just one small example, but over the course of my life, personal residence has done better than the stock market. Maybe that is just luck of the draw, it's hard to say, but I don't think adding real estate to your portfolio is ever a bad choice.

I couldn't be more specific with my 401k numbers because I've left that company and withdrawn my funds, but I know my return was nowhere near the ~20% I got from my townhouse. In fact for that period I believe I had a negative return in my 401k, so actually the 10k return statement was probably not even true.

I work with real estate investment funds and get to calculate the quarterly returns, and then I'm a real estate agent so the people I see making big money are all doing it in real estate.

Obviously I'm not privy to most people's retirement accounts, so all I can do is write from my own experiences, and my point in writing pretty much every post I write is to start the conversation. Obviously I know not every case is going to be the same, but I learn from other people's experiences through comparing and contrasting information.