a mortgage as a way of "forced savings" is a fallacy. There are several reasons as to why this is so, but i can give you one VERY good one to think about:
If a person wants to pull out their equity (it's equity on paper) out of their home they can do this. People here in Australia have been using their equity as an ATM machine to fund holidays, luxury cars and flat screen TV's in this last decade at an astonishing rate.
So they haven't really saved, they've spent their paper gain. All is good as long as that gain remains or goes up, or doesn't fall down too far. You cannot force a person to save. A mortgage is not a forced saving.
