The reason you encrypt your home directory is for security. As mentioned before, there are several pros and cons to encrypting your home directory, it is not something to take lightly. If you are going to the point of encrypting your home directory then you would also make the encryption password different than your login password. Each time the system boots you are asked for two passwords, your login password and your home directory encryption password. In this situation, if your drive or computer are stolen then the thief would not have access to your encrypted home directory. Even booting up the computer with a live system (cdrom/dvd/usb stick) would not allow the thief access to your encrypted home directory. All the thief would see is garbage on your home directory since they would not have the encryption password. Your login password would not help the thief in any way. Hope this helps.