re: How many of you retirees still have a home mortgage (purposefully)? What is your mindset?

quote:

---

The 50% bond allocation is being held while you have a 2.5% mortgage which to me doesn’t make much sense. Why wouldn’t you just payoff the mortgage instead of trying to beat a small spread between a mortgage and a bond.

---

That's why people should buy lower rated bonds during market stress, even HQ TIPS can get hammered depending on circumstance. Bought a lot of TIPS in late 2008 at significant discounts as they got hit nearly as badly as HY bonds as there was very little liquidity for many forms of fixed income other than T bonds. Still have those in tax advantaged accounts, added a significant amount of HY bonds in March/April 2020 for same reason. People need to have a longer term perspective of what they will need need at "X" date and what types of assets and buy when on sale, not just equities. I'm just under 65% stocks now but that might change. Even I-bonds were at 3.54% in May, but that's not going to take someone very far.