Congrats on launching! I just want to vent about something bank-related, and hopefully bait someone to tell me how this solves it. Or something else solves it. Have you ever heard how you could pay off your mortgage a lot quicker by making bi-weekly payments instead of monthly? Or how you can include extra with your payment and instruct your bank to apply it directly to the premium, helping you reduce your interest?…
An interesting thing I heard is that is not so convenient to pay off the mortgage earlier. Mortgages are debt with 1-3% per year. You could take the money you already have and put it in an ETF covering the whole market which kept for a long time (10 years) in average will return you 5-8% per year. I also had the instinct of paying off the mortgage faster if I could until they explained me that. Never had chance to do…
There are many ways to look at it, and the financial aspects aren't always the most important ones. If you have higher debt (credit card, etc) you probably want to pay those off first.
You may want to have ready cash available (stocks, ETFs, etc can be sold) - but once you put money back into your mortgage it can be hard to get it back out (HELOCs can affect this).
You may find you're not good with savings, and paying extra "forces" you to save (people do this with taxes all the time, preferring to get a large refund as a "windfall" vs having some amount of money extra each paycheck).
And it can all change AGAIN from a cash flow perspective - if you have a few years left on a ten year mortgage paying it down faster gets you to the point where you have no mortgage payment faster - that may not matter to you as much if you're 29 years left on a 30 year mortgage.
Also paying down debt is a certainty, but ETF returns could do anything (we have had ten year periods of negative returns in the past). Conversely, inflation makes your debt load lesser, assuming your income inflates at some point.