[mudderbutter]

My husband and I are 43. Our last child has left the nest. We own 3 homes, our net equity is roughly $300,000. We have this wild idea... what if we sold all three properties and downsized (which we plan on doing anyways) and own our property free & clear? Since we are so young, we could save roughly $4000 per month towards retirement. Even if we only averaged $3000 per month, we could save roughly $700000 before retirement in principal alone. It could be split up in different investments - some high risk some low. Thoughts? I know the conventional wisdom is to not pay off the mortgage due to the after tax issue, but it sure seems like a good idea to be mtg free and be able to put all that money away each month.

[bushg]

Buy the book by Dave Ramesy he makes terrific sense and may be able to help you.. I listen to him on the radio:good luck

[michealb]

Are 2 of your homes rental properties? If yes can you rent them out for enough to cover the mortgage payments?

[mudderbutter]

One home is our primary residence, 1 home is our vacation home, and one is an investment that we plan on selling anyway (it is a flip and not intended to be kept).

[michealb]

If they aren't making you money then it wouldn't hurt to sell them but it may not leverage your money correctly either. Lets look at some math first $3000 a month over say 22 years in an account that makes 6% gain will net you $1,638,677 at 8% it would be worth $2,150,364 nice little nest egg with your house paid off as well. Now if you have say $500,000 in houses that you are paying $3000 a month on your houses (if the housing market goes up at 6.5% the historical average for the USA) will be worth 4 time as much so they would be worth $2,000,000 so after you account for 22 years of mortgage payments your probably will have about the same. So what you need to do is get specific numbers and really plan out what you really want to do and how much money you need to retire.

[mudderbutter]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! These are great answers.

[gazelleintense]

Id sell them to be debt free... with no debt you can save big time for emergencies, retirement... 100% of the time, a paid for home will NOT get foreclosed on... which is smart...

[michealb]

I generally agree that debt is bad, but what most people don't realize is that there is good debt and bad debt. Houses are generally good debt because you can often leverage mortgage debt to make more money since mortgage money is generally cheap

[ballengerb1]

So how does one communicate with Gazelle with no PM set up and e-mails are blocked?