A couple of readers have questioned my recent column cautioning about withdrawing from a 401(k) for a down payment on a house.

They said I overlooked the value of “leverage” and thus made the move look less appealing than it is.

I used an example of a person who needed $20,000 for a down payment on a $200,000 home. To get that after paying 35 percent in tax and early withdrawal penalty, he would have to withdraw $31,000.

The $20,000 down payment would thus have to grow by 55 percent to get back the $11,000 lost to tax and penalty, I said.

Wrong, said the two readers: It’s the value of the HOUSE that has to grow $11,000, not the down payment. That’s a mere 5.5 gain on the $200,000 purchase price.

So who’s right?

I still prefer my conservative view.

The readers focus on “leverage” – the result of borrowing most of the money for the purchase.

If you paid $200,000 cash and the house value grew 10 percent, you’d earn 10 percent on the money tied up. Put just $20,000 down and borrow the rest, and there’d be a 100 percent return in the tied-up money.

But that gain is reduced by the interest paid on the loan.

Worse: The home might fall in value. If it dropped to $180,000, the owner would have lost 100 percent of the down payment, while the owner who paid cash would have lost just 10 percent. Leverage isn’t always good.

As I said in the previous column, using 401(k) money for a house is not as bad as blowing it on a vacation. But the costs can be quite high. This option is best kept as a last resort.

Studies have long shown that employees don’t get as much out of their 401(k)s as they could.

Hewitt Associates, the consulting firm, said this week that its study of 2.5 million American workers found that 30 percent of eligible employees don’t even participate.

Also disturbing: Average balances were a meager $64,600.

Younger employees were too conservative in their investments while older ones often took too much risk, holding lots of stock in companies they worked for.

Another recent column said Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities hold their value better than ordinary bonds in the face of rising interest rates – the threat we face today.

Some readers asked why. Here’s an explanation from Ken Volpert, a TIPS fund manager at Vanguard Group.

The yield, or interest rate, paid by a bond can be broken into three parts: first, “real” yield – what the bond pays after inflation is taken into account; then a portion reflecting investors’ belief about what inflation will be; finally, a small bit based on their fear it will be higher.