Can not owning a car buy you a house?

I‘ve read many personal finance articles that claim you can save big by ditching your car and jet-packing, hover-boarding, or *shudder* walking everywhere instead. Monevator published a good one recently, which prompted car-swerving frugalista The Investor to claim he could have spun his savings into £300,000 to £450,000, just by ploughing them into a global equities tracker these past 30 years. If that’s right, then hopefully he’s gonna cut us in because The Accumulators regularly ferried TI and his glow-sticks around sundry West Country amenities during the 1990s. If you’re thinking the bear-baiting and badger hassling, well, I can neither confirm nor deny. So how big a payout did I forgo by keeping my pedal to the metal instead? Can you really rake in nearly half a mil in exchange for 30 years of hanging about for buses? Put another way: can you buy yourself a nice house by investing your car money instead? Real numbers Let’s do the sums. Except this time, let’s use some proper…