When I was younger, I think I always expected I’d have a house payment forever. As I’ve gotten older I have realized that debt is evil and the sooner we can pay off the mortgage, the better. I can’t wait until the day that I can walk through the front door of my house with the deed in hand, much like Nickel over at Five Cent Nickel.
What makes this more difficult is that we live in a part of the country where housing is relatively expensive. The original purchase price of our house was $280,000. While we’ve been paying on that for almost 7 years, we still have a long ways to go. The good news is that if we were to magically find about $130K, we’d have the option of paying the house off. You can bet if we do come in to any amount of money like that, we’ll definitely pay the house off right away.
The thought of living in a home that is paid for is very exciting to me. While we’d still have taxes and insurance to worry about, the reduction in our monthly bills would give us a ton more options. Even with the mortgage, we are currently living on about 50% of our after tax monthly income. If we were to lose our mortgage as well, it would drop us down to living on about 32% of our after tax income. At that point, we could definitely think about pursuing work that we are more passionate about with little regard to what the compensation was.
I hear ya. We’re a LONG ways off from even being able to consider it, but it’s funny, even when I lived alone in a much cheaper condo a few years back, I couldn’t really fathom the idea of not having a mortgage payment. Now, I can not only fathom it but can imagine how awesome a feeling it would be to have that burden removed and to not owe anybody! Keep us posted, it sounds like you have the motivation and the means to make good progress, and that will certainly keep those of us who ‘share the dream’ motivated.