Could not chdir to home directory home Permission denied

This one has caught me a couple times and I keep forgetting how simple it is to solve. When you create a new user and then login as the new user, you get this message:

Could not chdir to home directory /home/user: Permission denied
-bash: /home/user .bash_profile: Permission denied

And you find that you are not (and not able to get into) the user home directory.

For whatever reason I have yet to revolve how this happens when creating a new user account (from root), permissions somehow do not work. So after creating an new user as root, be sure to check permission and/or change according to:

chmod -R 755 /home