Anyone mortgage free?

aml3679

Sylvester and Sophia's Mom
Joined
Jun 24, 2000
My husband and I moved from New Hampshire to Florida last October.

In New Hampshire, we had a beautiful town home that was almost 2000 sq feet. It also came with a hefty $2000 a month mortgage and a $7000 a year for property taxes.

We sold our beautiful home in New Hampshire and bought a 1972 double-wide mobile home in a 55+ community in Florida.

We gutted the whole house and put over $25000 into it. We put new floors, walls, driveway, screened-in patio, blinds, ac on our lanai, etc. It looks nice.

With the money we got from selling our home in New Hampshire plus what we had to put into it, we were able to buy our home for cash.

It feels good to be mortgage free. Thank goodness, no sooner than we got to Florida, than I lost my job and did not find one for almost 2 weeks.
 
we are as well-and yes it does feel good. i'm always surprised though when people are under the impression that once you've paid off your home you've got ALL that mortgage payment available to spend on whatever you want, um...no, take a look at the breakdown of a mortgage payment and look at how much of the monthly payment goes towards property taxes and homeowners insurance (and for some-h.o.a. dues)-that doesn't stop when the home is paid off, and most if not all of those i know with paid off mortgages put out additional money to get umbrella insurance policies to protect that home/asset so that's an expense as well.

i enjoy not paying the credit union my mortgage each month but i still make a monthly payment to another account i use as a self managed 'escrow' to cover all the OTHER expenses.
 
Our financial advisor advised us not to be mortgage free when we downsized for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that at the time mortgage rates were really low (ours is less than 4%) and our investments were going well (around 8%).
 
Yes got my house paid off when I was 39. I only have a little house 1144 square feet. All we need. I’m 48 now. Glad I did what I did. Buy a new house when you are young. When you have a mortgage payment you don’t won’t things breaking down or needing to be replaced. You never do but it’s a little easier when you don’t have a mortgage payment.
 


My dd lives in New Brunswick NH-what a pretty state, anyways, I would love to do what you are doing.

But, my husband loves his job and told me he still wants to make his mark with the company.
And, he does not want to move anywhere, where there might be a threat of hurricanes-we are very polar opposites.

We pretty much pay the same mortgage that you had, since I am trying to double down on it and get it our house paid off.
We built our dream home 4 years ago. If we would be living in our old home, we would be mortgage free today.

I hope you love Florida-what kind of job do you have.
 
Congrats! Are there property taxes or monthly association fees in your new location?
 
Yep in fact this is our second house we havd paid off early sbdbit feels great. We bought a starter home and paid that off to put down on our forever home then paid that off in ten years. Without a mortgage we were able to get our kids through college debt free plus have a nice 401k
 


We will be in about 4 months! We have always paid our property taxes (yearly) and homeowners insurance (monthly) separate from our mortgage payment, so our monthly expenses will go down the amount of that payment. We will both be 42 when it is paid off.
 
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My parents, who live in SE WI (much higher COLA than us), pay as much in taxes/insurance/HOA fees as we do for our mortgage. I was shocked when they told me that, since I thought once their mortgage was paid off, all would be good. Whew, not!

We owe for a long time still on our mortgage, but live in an area with few rentals, and the ones that are out there are as expensive as a house payment, so I consider it a wash. We may pay it off, or sell it when we have to downsize, but in the meantime, it's "ours".

Terri
 
My husband and I became mortgage free the year we both turned 40, in 2016. It's a fantastic feeling!!!!


Every once in a while I get the urge to start looking at other houses, that are just a tiny bit bigger or have a bigger yard; it would mean taking on a small mortgage again (less than $100K) and then I think about how much I love being mortgage free and how much I love going on vacation and it passes :rotfl:
 
we are as well-and yes it does feel good. i'm always surprised though when people are under the impression that once you've paid off your home you've got ALL that mortgage payment available to spend on whatever you want, um...no, take a look at the breakdown of a mortgage payment and look at how much of the monthly payment goes towards property taxes and homeowners insurance (and for some-h.o.a. dues)-that doesn't stop when the home is paid off, and most if not all of those i know with paid off mortgages put out additional money to get umbrella insurance policies to protect that home/asset so that's an expense as well.

i enjoy not paying the credit union my mortgage each month but i still make a monthly payment to another account i use as a self managed 'escrow' to cover all the OTHER expenses.

My lender refused to do escrow accounts for anything (insurance, property taxes) once we had 20% equity, so for us, we did have 100% of the mortgage money for whatever we wanted, which was saving for college for our kids...the oldest started college 5 years after we paid off the house in 2000. Wonders of a 15 year mortgage, and adding $100 a month to the payment. With 2 refinances, it took us 17 years, but we got it paid off. We had to take over paying the property taxes and insurance on our own with the first refinance, which came 5 years after we bought the house.
 
My lender refused to do escrow accounts for anything (insurance, property taxes) once we had 20% equity, so for us, we did have 100% of the mortgage money for whatever we wanted, which was saving for college for our kids...the oldest started college 5 years after we paid off the house in 2000. Wonders of a 15 year mortgage, and adding $100 a month to the payment. With 2 refinances, it took us 17 years, but we got it paid off. We had to take over paying the property taxes and insurance on our own with the first refinance, which came 5 years after we bought the house.

wish i had that lender back when we bought the now paid off house. we had a california based lender and i fought tooth and nail with them on a 50% down payment to self pay property taxes and homeowner's insurance. despite providing them with verification of what the estimated property taxes and insurance would run they couldn't fathom it being that low w/the taxable value of the home and wanted to withhold 3x the amount 'just in case, and don't worry-we'll refund you the difference at the end of a year if OUR calculations are off':crazy: um, NO. i recognize that the taxable value to tax ratio would be unheard of in california and the homeowner's insurance was higher coverage at a fraction of the cost but that's why we were buying in another state.
 
wish i had that lender back when we bought the now paid off house. we had a california based lender and i fought tooth and nail with them on a 50% down payment to self pay property taxes and homeowner's insurance. despite providing them with verification of what the estimated property taxes and insurance would run they couldn't fathom it being that low w/the taxable value of the home and wanted to withhold 3x the amount 'just in case, and don't worry-we'll refund you the difference at the end of a year if OUR calculations are off':crazy: um, NO. i recognize that the taxable value to tax ratio would be unheard of in california and the homeowner's insurance was higher coverage at a fraction of the cost but that's why we were buying in another state.
I'm in California, and I used a California Savings and Loan.
 
Paid off our Mortgage after being in the house for 5 years... to be fair I has a condo that I also paid off but bought in the very late 90's before the housing boom and made over 100k on the sale after living there 4 years. However my property taxes went from around 7K when we paid the house off to over 12K today....
 
We aren't mortgage free and don't plan to be (unless we do what the OP did, which isn't happening). I'm not selling my house to buy a double wide. I will sell to downsize but unless we move far from where we are, we can't pay cash even with our 300K in equity unless we want a small condo. Funny, depending on where you live what you consider a hefty mortgage payment. Ours is $3800 and our property taxes are 9K/yr and we've been here 15 years (refinanced to 3.75% a few years ago). Now, we have almost 6000 sq feet on 2/3 acre, but to "downsize" to even 2000 sq feet we would still have a mortgage payment. Our financial planner doesn't seem too concerned about us paying it off, but he knows we do plan to downsize and our retirement income will more than cover it. I'm retiring in just under 2 years when I'm 60 and DH plans to in about 4 years when he's 65. We have no other debt and currently live on about 1/2 of our take home pay which leaves plenty to tithe, vacation, add to our investments, and gift to others so having a mortgage doesn't really bother us. I know almost no one who is mortgage free under the age of 65 or 70 in this area (NoVA). Most who are either inherited money or have been in their homes 30 years and paid it off over that time. We probably will start paying ours down a bit, but we need to do some renovations to our 15 year old bathroom which will probably run at least 35K.
 
Yes, we paid off our mortgage last spring. It’s the best feeling. We set up a separate savings acct and have money direct deposited there every month that’s enough to pay the property taxes and insurance.
 
We’ve been mortgage free on our main residence for 10 years. We own a vacation home that we are planning to sell. It will be nice to be mortgage free again for a few years before collage tuition starts!
 

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