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Piad off the condo 2.5 years after the wife and I got married. That was the first home paid off in 1992. Then she gets the idea to buy a home that was another $40k on top of what we got for the condo. Paid that one off in another 4 years.
Then I got the wild idea to build a home. Sold my shop and built my first home ever in my life. It was paid off when we moved in and sold the previous home.
3.5 years later we sold that home for $335k almost when the market peaked. I built the next home with the profit from the first home and we banked the original capital from two homes previous.
The market tanked before I could convince her to sell this one and the value dropped a good bit, but we still have only half of the value in cost, but that does not include any compensation for my 16 months of work building the house.
It sure makes living on a retirement income easier to not have any auto or home related debt. Add up the interest you pay monthly, the multiply that by 12 months and then 15 years to get an idea what debt free can do to your net worth. For us when we first got married in 1989 it was $1500 a month, for house, business, and cars.
180 times 1500 is a lot of money. To say nothing about the much much higher taxes we would have paid on our otherwise two incomes combined, something she still does not completely understand.
It's not so much how much you make, but how much your net worth grows year to year. Before I built the first house and sold my shop, my top rate was 28% Federal, 6% state, and both halves of FICA (self employed) at 15.2%. 49% gone before I got the other 50.1% The year we sold the first house I built, our income was over 200k, mostly due to the house sale and we only paid $4k in Federal Income Tax.
regards
Mech
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