Poll - This is a simple Poll - Is your primary residence fully paid off? AKA no Mortgage, Line of Credit or other Lien.

[meleana]

Haven’t had a mortgage in like 20 years now.

 

[Uplooking]

Paid off just before retirement at FRA+1. DW had that as a goal before I retired and we didn't have a great loan rate anyway. And yes, we have been in the same house for over 30 years now.

 

[Nightcap]

I have a small mortgage that I’m in no hurry to pay off. As someone else noted, my home is an appreciating asset being paid for with depreciating dollars. It’s my only debt.

 

[Tracer]

Two prior single family homes had mortgages. Rented for a while after divorce at a couple of different places then purchased my current condo for cash. Been mortgage free for over 20 years.

 

[Acollector]

Nope. Can't pass up our current 2.875% mortgage rate

Agree, with 2,875 percent mortgage have made 21%+ on my cash sitting to pay it off if needed. Have thought about paying down but not yet!

 

[ferbm]

Could pay off at any time, but at 2.875% like others, have decided not to. There are about 10 years left on the note, and we will sell long before that.

 

[ronocnikral]

been mortgage free since 2020 (I was 37 at the time). I got laid off and we paid off the house. Kind of counter-intuitive, but it has given me and DW peace of mind.

 

[almost there]

Paid it off about 25 years ago. That move helped make retirement possible.

 

[SlowlySaving]

Yes, we paid it off years ago. Allowed us to invest more in the stock market.

 

[PatrickW]

2.675%. Enough said....

 

[hotwired]

Nope. Can't pass up our current 2.875% mortgage rate

That's exactly our rate. We actually did a cash out on our primary residence to pay off a higher interest investment property loan, and we did a dollar for a dollar so that we could track it and deduct the interest expense per hour very conservative accountants blessing.My only request is that I didn't take our banker up in his offer to give us an extra 40K because of the additional equity we had!

 

[old medic]

Maybe if the poll had asked "How long has your primary residence been paid off?" would have been more informative, since most here do have it paid off.

The day we bought them....

 

[COcheesehead]

I carried a low rate mortgage on my last house just because the delta between what I was paying and what I could earn easily in muni bonds was almost a 100% difference.

What I didn’t think about when I paid cash for our current house was how it changes the math on years of expenses on hand. Without the mortgage, our portfolio currently represents 118 years of expenses. Not that it matters, but it is a surprise.

 

[Ben]

2.25% fixed for 30 years. Originated the loan in 2021. House has appreciated by ~50% since we purchased. This is one of those topics I constantly revisit. It would be nice to drop the P+I, but with high property tax in my area relative to other surrounding areas, the T+I portion is almost as much as the P+I so my plan is to keep the $$ invested rather than payoff.

 

[VanWinkle]

We bought the current build with cash in 2023. SO and I sold our homes for about the same amount and purchased a newly built home in Tennessee with the proceeds.

 

[Fermion]

Since we built our house from scratch ourselves it was paid off from the start. I do have a shoebox full of receipts somewhere but they are probably faded now.

 

[jldavid47]

We paid off our last mortgage in 2018. Not having one helps from a monthly cash flow perspective. I have a friend who is still carrying theirs at 2.75% and I don't blame him. If our mortgage had been at 2.75% fixed I'd probably still have one as well.

[edit] We do have a HELOC with a balance of $0. It's only there in case of an extreme emergency and to make it look like there is a lien on the property.

 

[COcheesehead]

…to make it look like there is a lien on the property.

What is the advantage?

 

[Crewer]

2.3% and 3 years to go.

Paid off a mortgage when rates were more like 12 - 14%. Why I have one now is complicated with a larger fixer upper in there a couple of places ago. This is my forever place unless I need to move close to kids - who live not so far away now but that could change.

 

[oiseux]

Primary home still has two years left at 2.625%. Pretty much all principal earning more money. Second home as a 1.6% rate and 11 years left. Short term rentals have paid for it all --- should have put less down.

 

[Eagle43]

Yes, since 2003.

 

[samcat]

Paid off in 2011 and have never regretted it. We were able to cash flow college using savings plus what would have been our mortgage payment. Now we have way more than we need to retire.

Nothing better than knowing our house is ours and as long as we pay our property taxes, no one can take it away.

 

[samcat]

Also, lived in our house for almost 32 years but paid it off after 17.

 

[Rustic23]

Paid off upon retirement. In TX you can defer property taxes if over 75. Can be iffy if you have a mortgage. It’s our fallback plan.

 

[rodi]

Paid off in the middle of the 08/09 winter, right in the crash, preparing to reduce expenses if one of us got laid off that year (we didn't).

Of note though per your title, we do have a HELOC, but it's currently unused. So we do technically have a line of credit on the home. But that's just for if we need an emergency cash infusion.

This except we paid it off in 2014. Trying to reduce cash flow for retirement. I retired at 52, 2 months after the mortgage was paid off.

We've had a Heloc since retirement also. Not used. Will expire in 2029. The idea was that we could use it for tax reasons if we needed to make a large, taxable withdraw. Bridge the tax hit over 2 years.