The recent housing boom created a tsunami of Americans buying bigger and bigger homes with the idea of riding real estate up to the stratosphere and then downsizing to a small house in retirement with a load of money. If I just described your retirement plan, stay away from the kitchen knives as I continue.

Recently Jonathan Clements of the Wall Street Journal ran number with a financial consultant to see if the big house strategy worked better than staying in a smaller, cheaper to run house and investing the difference.

To be fair, they even stacked the numbers in favor of the big house and estimated the return on the small home investment portfolio at only 2.2% above inflation each year.

Here's the sharp knife part...it costs a whole lot more to run a big house - so unless you were to lose nearly half the value of your mutual funds to taxes, the small house strategy wins big.

McMansion anyone?!!