How many of you have paid off your home?

Our home is paid off, I'm 36 and wife is 28. My wife wanted a brand new home built from the ground up. So I told her I would pay all current bills/rent and if she wanted, she could start saving her salary and we would build one.

4yrs later, (4yrs ago) we broke ground. My father, My brother, My mother, My grandfather, My wife and I started building. (My Father did most of the work himself)

Yeah, it took 10 months from ground breaking to moving in, And it isn't fancy brick or stone floors, but we saved almost $35,000 by building it ourselves. (thank you city for not requiring a contractor! ) We did have to borrow $12,000 for the heating and cooling system, but the rest was saved up and paid for when we purchased it.

If there are such things as "Mortgages" when I hit 60, (wife will be 52) And our girls are married and financially stable, We plan to mortgage the house to the max, and travel and enjoy ourselves. At this rate, our retirements will pay for the monthly bills and a mortgage, the lump sum mortgage will pay for cruises, and traveling...........

When we die, the bank can have the stinkin house!!!!!!! Less BS for our girls to deal with! :rockon:

 

Just a thought....it's probably best not to mention this little plan to the bank when you're applying for the mortgage.

Congratulations on building your own home. I would have done that, but decided to restore an old one instead. Silly me.

 

House paid off, no debt except for the loan on one of my Prii. I couldn't turn down 2% financing especially since I parked the money in a tax free Massachusetts Muni Mutual fund that was up 16% last year. It's nice playing with the house's money....literally!

 

I admit that I like the convenience of plastic. I pay in full every month. Actually, more often, since I sometimes pay off the balance when I happen to be on my bank's web page. But I started using plastic for the small stuff that used to be cash when a local bank started offering attractive rates (4% then, down to 2.5% now) on checking accounts up to $25,000 providing that you use the related debit card at least 12 times a month.

Mortgaging the house with the idea of spending the money and walking away may not be a great idea as the bank might not be willing to loan you enough to justify walking away.

 

Yes, Daniel, except that extra incentive to use the bank's credit card several times a month used to net my CitiGold savings account an extra 0.50% interest/mo. (was real money then) and now it is down to only 0.000000000002% more per month. I'd do better trying to set up a gold mining operation in my all-black-dirt Illinois 1/4 acre back yard and then going to a Cash for Gold store to get ripped off. Still, I use that card every other day to buy food, you know, to show the bank that I still care*.


* caring probably drops my credit score

 

In your case, there is no incentive. In my case, I'm still getting 2.5% from the account with the debit card, compared to about 0.1 percent from a savings account. Still not a lot of dollars, so what really happened was that by offering me the higher interest rate they hooked me into the convenience of the plastic.

My "real" money is in investments that are doing much better. But one needs some liquid money for food, taxes, toys, and travel.

 

If I use my debit card 10 times a month, I get a higher interest on my checking account (which, nowadays I believe the "High interest account" is something like 1.0%). So once a week I use it to go out to lunch, once a week for groceries, once a month for gas, and once a month for just some random purchase.

 

Does Stev0's account have a cap on the principal that gets the higher rate?

Daniel's account requires at least 144 transactions to get, at best, $625 in interest, or at best $4.34 per minimum required transaction. That might be worthwhile.

But the deal offered me has a lower cap, limiting the take to $249 for the same number of transactions, or $1.73 per required transaction. Since I'm not a debit card sort of consumer, the excess random purchases required to qualify for the program will completely wipe out the gain. No thanks.

 

The 2.5% caps at $25,000, but the rest (no limit) still pays more than the checking account at my other bank. Don't remember the amount. Used to be 1% and now I think it's 1/2%.

Those rates got me into the program, but I actually found that I like using the debit card more than using cash. They "tricked" me into it. But I like it, so I don't mind. It's like getting a free Kindle book to hook you into a series that turns out to be really enjoyable.

Silly related side note: One of the biggest problems with the Tesla Roadster is that the seat design is such that coins fall out of your pockets into an area that is almost impossible to get at. Using the debit card means I don't have to keep any change in my pockets when I go to stores.

 

The account available to me pays 0.31% above the cap if qualified, compared to 0.05% unqualified. But the household moneymarket accounts, while now abysmal, are still much better. So I would count everything above the cap on the debt card incentive as a loss, not a gain.

 

Yes, but that cap is $100,000, so I'm not going to worry about bumping into that.