Considering Early Mortgage Payoff: My Personal Experience and Reasons

My wife and I made history a few years ago by paying off our mortgage early.

This is the first time we’ve widely distributed it.

At $185K, we made a 25% down payment to avoid PMI and end up with a 15-year mortgage of about $140K with an interest rate of 5.83% at the time of taking out our loan.

We could have chosen the traditional 30-year mortgage, taking full advantage of its tax deduction potential.

Refinancing our mortgage to reduce interest costs – Although re-financing could have reduced our monthly interest payments by several thousand dollars each time, re-financing could have cost several thousands more in total and increased our expenses further.

As most others do, we could have followed the trend and “up-sized” after some time (instead, we had already taken the opposite path and downsized after purchasing too large of a home initially.) But instead we found ourselves sticking around.

Mercifully, none of these things happened. Instead, we executed a mortgage payoff with 11 years left; let’s call it “4-year mortgage”.