This thread is awesome - very inspiring and also slightly depressing as I am 55 and seemingly about in the middle of the folks on here. Mistake I made was not contributing to 401k early - trying to catch up a bit now. Also got the divorce so that was a setback but thankfully it was amicable so damage was minimized.

One suggestion for those that are paying on a mortgage is make extra payments. I took out a 15 year loan 6 years ago and did payments every 2 weeks so you get an extra principal payment annually that way and when I had extra coins paid more on it. I am now a year away max of paying off my crib. Super excited to get rid of that payment soon.

On that note my uncle years ago stated be careful on paying off your house as there are the scammers out there that "steal" the title and take a loan out on the property. I am pretty paranoid with all these scammers these days on all fronts. I have a HELOC which I will keep (no balance) in case of emergency and also to have the bank on the title to help protect against someone trying to F with my title when the crib is paid off.

Did any of you that have your house paid off take any extra steps to protect your title? I see some advertisements of title lock or something like that.

Thanks and good job to everyone on here!!

I am doing the pay off and I am in finance. Yes.....leveraging coins is great....however the mental freeness of having no debt outweighs that for me.

My boss does the leveraging thing. Yesterday his wife's company got bought.....today she lost her $80k job which they count on. Huge mortgage and tax bills that were pretty easy 2 days ago and now he is rightfully worried.

I will invest the excess coins after I get the crib paid off. It's a risk tolerance question.

Ummmmm the odds of that reversing over the long term may not be all that great

My cousin did just this - retired Lieutenant and now he does Security for a local college.

This thread is awesome. Nice thing is on most of the topics outside of certain health issues you can course correct like on spending, 401k, etc. Never too late.

I am allergic to interest expense - it raises the cost of anything even if it is a low rate. Granted low car loan rates are good deals but still raise the ultimate cash outlay for the car. If you can get to the position where you only buy something if you have the cash it will curtail your spending and give you the lowest price. On the flip side I try to string out cash outlays with no interest - 6 month same as cash, paying a medical deductible over 12 months, etc.