Mortgage Loan: Closed
 

Feels like a success story for me. Sent the final payment overnight Friday. Checked after getting home tonight and it showed Mortgage Loan: Closed! FINALLY! Own my house with no debt and just one credit card with a 0 balance. Feel so 'free' now. : D
VT247

Congratulations! :)

HA! Did you go pay the fee to the Title company? You might not be "all done" yet! :eek:

Even though the value of my place has increased 300% since I bought it 11 years ago (If you Google Vancouver BC real estate prices you will see it is sickly out of whack with reality), I won't be paying it off anytime soon. I can only dream about being payment free in the future. Good on you, and enjoy your freedom of monthly payments!! I have honestly considered moving south to the Dakotas where some of my friends live, just because it's a place where you can actually own a house. The average price for a detached house where I am is $1.1 million (it's a suburb called Richmond in case you want to nerd out and actually look it up). And the Canadian and American dollar are only off by about 3 cents from being at par at the moment. As someone that will probably never be mortgage free, I wish you good luck in your debt free life lol.

I'm happy right now. I own my can completely, no debt at all (I'm an engineering major, so give it a few years and I'll be crying the corner looking at my student loan debt if I can't get a job.)
I fear debt very much.

Darn, I hope that fee was already priced in. Eh, it's close enough. This drinks on me. Time to celebrate.
VT247

I just cracked a beer for you! Debt free mortgage wise is such a stretch here that I am really jealous I have to say. Now take the money you save and buy a first gen Insight lol.

My friends laughed at me when I was all excited to pay my mortgage off, only to discover I had a few more bucks to shell out. :/

But when that's over with you can enjoy the increase in security and disposable income! :thumbup:

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

You never really own your home, there are always other fees, taxes and bills you need to pay. Opps, forgot to say HOA too. :eek: In Richmond they charge you for storm water run off based on the sq ft of your land and if you own a condo they go based on the whole complex vs your little unit rather its in a single or multi story unit.

Congrads otherwise, however they may charge a fee for the final deed or paper work. Where I use to work you had to pay to get your car title once you paid for your car in full. :eek:

...exactly, you've just exchanged MONTHY payments for ANNUAL tax payments...albeit less costly.

An insight would be sweet. But my daily driver is still the diesel Tempo.
My wife paid the monthly bills, cable, electric, gas, water, sewage. I paid off the mortgage. Bought and sold 9 cars since the beginning of the year. Indiana makes it easy to flip cars. All of that $ went towards payoff. Plan is to move to Crescent City California and downsize. Work as a nurse, mechanic or truck driver. Keep the house in Indiana and have a trailer bought in Cali. At any rate, live as close to being debt free as possible in a place we both love and at a job that doesn't suck.
I can't wait to get there. So close and worked so hard at accomplishing this goal. Now it's time to hustle up some quick cash and make this dream a reality.
http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/...psf70089c6.jpg

I used to live in crescent city. Protip: the hospital is nicknamed 'Slaughter Coast' for a reason.
Though delnorte county doesn't have to deal with smogging, so you can run straight pipes and a 20:1 AFR.

Congratulations! Awesome accomplishment! Paid mine off a few years ago and it is definitely an amazing feeling...!

Paid mine off in 2002. It's a great feeling. Congratulations!

H-Man, how did you like living in Crescent City? The times I've gone, it's been awsome! Know that sometimes things are different when living there. What's been your experience there?
VT247

Sold! Forget the Dakotas lol.

If you need a doctor for more than a sore throat, you have to drive to Eureka to get a competent one.
It rains so much in crescent city that if you don't have air conditioning, you will have black mold (caused years of seizures for me, thus many trips to eureka trying to figure it out, moving back to southern California made the seizures go away. )
Have you ever been to Ojai? About the same size, but the people seem to be friendlier here.

Congrats for sure! I'm paying my last payment on Monday. Yes, with property tax, outright ownership isn't possible, however, I'll be OK with that instead of paying that plus a mortgage too. By paying early I saved 60K in interest. That will pay a lot of property tax.

...we paid-off our 30 year mortgage 4½ years early because we sent in more than the monthly payment, so we owned our house free-n-clear when we both retired. But, it was a sudden 'surprize' how much the taxes and insurances were when they come "due" the first year, because, before, they were 'part' of the monthly payment. Now, they're just two BIG bills, each year.

Congrats, OM. I am about 4 years from owning my place. 27K left to pay. Of course with one in college and another just starting HS this year, there is a chance at some point I will take a few bucks out of it to pay those off. Just hope the free money the banks are loaning currently holds out. I suspect it won't.

What I would really like to do is move somewhere else eventually, where taxes and insurance alone won't add up to 500 bucks a month or close to it.

I was thinking desert SW, but that coastline pic of NoCal has me wondering. It really is beautiful out there. As for the mold problem, wouldn't a dehumidifier work better than an AC? I realize that AC does dehumidify, but is a lot more efficient, or so I would think.

...take your pick:

CALIFORNIA = earth quakes, high gasoline prices, power brown outs

WASHINGTON = volcanoes, mudslides, forest fires

ARIZONA = monsoon floods, haboob sandstorms, "valley fever" fungus, forest fires

CONNECTICUT = snow, snow, snow (wink,wink), "Nor'easterners"

The snow doesn't bother me as much as the damn taxes. Even after my mortgage is paid, I am looking at close to 500 bucks a month in taxes/insurance.

Maybe I'll just end up like all the other old coots in a doublewide in florida.

My taxes are $214.... a year.

let me add to that

OHIO = cheap land, cheap gas, no jobs, experience all 4 seasons in a week

Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas and Washington have NO income taxes, but they "get" you with other taxes: sales, property (home, vehicles, etc.).

Indiana has lost all appeal. There ain't nothin' here but corn. Wild temperature fluctuations destroy everything around the house. Need a new roof every few years from the rain and snow. The freezing winters destroy the roads and any cement drive. It's bitter cold in the winter and scorching hot in the summer.
California, it's not perfect. But better than what's here. Temps don't go to low in the winter and summer it isn't so bad either. Lots of rain where I'm headed though. Been all over the country, nothing compares to how much I like it out west.
I'm by no means rich. Combined income of @ $65k. Not much when you add in 2 kids. Staying in Indiana would certainly be easier, but I've got to try Cali. At least for a year. After that, either move back to the midwest or find a real house in NorCal instead of a trailer.
VT247

I tried Cal for 6 months then went back to the Midwest. The beaches are nicer but the weather, surprisingly enough, isn't always. Where I was, it was far too congested. And expensive!

Huge congrats on paying off the house!!!!

Congrats ! That is great work !

I know the feeling. It can be done. Keep your financial skills that you have learned...you can apply them for the rest of your life.

You don't have to be rich for sure. My first real job out of college and I had a mortgage 2 years later in 2002, sold my very first house at the height of the regional housing boom in 2006, then used the proceeds with which I bought and paid for my much bigger yard/house in a much smaller community, paid off all my student loans & car loans and any all credit cards...with cash. All in 4 years.

Debt and interest are monsters that should be feared and respected....for they have no compassion and they never sleep.

Considering getting a personal loan now in order to buy a trailer (mobile home) I found in Crescent City. Am I crazy for NOT wanting to get a HELOC or secured loan? Even though the APR is higher for a personal loan, I really don't want to put the house up for collateral or any of the cars. My credit score is considered A+, but the APR on a personal loan is still 10%! OUCH! Know that I would still pay it off regardless, but perhaps I'm funny about not wanting to put up collateral. What would you do and why?
VT247

I would not get a loan. :-)