Fifty years ago, my grandparents built a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house on 4 acres of land with cash saved up from my grandfather's manual labor job (he stopped going to school in 8th grade) working for a sugar cane plant. They never, in the entirety of their lives, took out a loan. The simple fact of the matter is that they saved and invested back when it was easy to save and invest and thus never needed to rely on a bank for anything other than a place to store money. Oh, and they sent their 5 kids to college.

Try to do that today in the same area. The foremen at the same sugar house could never afford a regular residential lot, much less the a house to put on it. It would take them 20+ years to save the money.