Paying off your mortgage early is supposed to be one of those life-changing financial moments. No more monthly house payment, more money to invest and the security of knowing that your home is completely yours. But for one 43-year-old man, reaching that milestone didn’t feel quite like he imagined.
Tony, from West Palm Beach, Florida, recently called “The Ramsey Show” after paying off the remaining $110,000 on his mortgage in roughly three years. “I thought it’d be more freedom than I have,” he said.
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His house is now worth about $700,000, but instead of feeling financially set, Tony found himself worrying about everything he hadn’t done yet.
The Mortgage Was Gone, But The Other Goals Weren’t
Tony and his wife earn about $172,000 a year, and he has a pension through work. But he has only around $60,000 across his investment accounts and about $12,000 in savings. He also has three daughters. One is in high school, one in middle school and one in elementary school, and he hasn’t put much aside for college.
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Part of the problem was how intensely Tony focused on his house. After discovering the Ramsey approach about five years ago, he started attacking his debts and eventually sold another property he’d owned since he was about 20 to help wipe out the mortgage.
He also scaled back his investing. Tony had been putting around $800 a month into investments but reduced that amount when he realized the mortgage finish line was getting close.
“I could see the light at the end of the tunnel here that I can get this house paid off,” he said, “and tried to really push to get the house done.”
Co-host George Kamel suggested Tony had expected the paid-off house to accomplish more emotionally and financially than any single milestone could.
“You thought paying off the house would somehow solve all of the other problems,” Kamel said. “It would solve retirement. It would solve college funding. It would give you purpose.”
Instead, he continued, “all it did was it gave you freedom and peace and some extra margin.”
Paying Off The Mortgage Wasn’t The End
Co-host Rachel Cruze pointed out that the Ramsey plan doesn’t call for people to stop retirement investing while aggressively paying off their mortgage. It recommends putting 15% of household income toward retirement and saving for children’s college before directing extra money toward the house.
Cruze wondered whether Tony would have felt less overwhelmed if he’d taken another four or five years to pay off the mortgage while simultaneously building those other “buckets.”
Still, Tony has plenty working in his favor. At 43, he owns a roughly $700,000 home outright and no longer has a mortgage competing for his income. The hosts calculated that 15% of the couple’s income would be about $2,150 a month for retirement. Tony currently invests around $1,200 monthly, leaving room to increase that amount.
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Major decisions about how much to invest, how aggressively to save for college and how to balance competing goals are often more complicated than not. Advisor.com connects people with fiduciary financial professionals who help with budgeting, taxes, estate planning and more. Its matching quiz takes about five minutes, and once you find the right fit, you can book their services right away.
Using the assumptions on the show, Cruze calculated that starting with $60,000 and investing roughly $2,000 a month for the next 25 years could result in about $4 million in retirement savings. With the value of Tony’s paid-off home, he could potentially have a net worth of close to $6 million by then, plus his pension and Social Security.
So, perhaps the bigger lesson from Tony’s experience is that financial freedom doesn’t arrive all at once just because one big bill disappears.
“It’s not a race where there’s a million people running,” Kamel said. “It’s just Tony’s race.”
Image: Shutterstock
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