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

Sort of the same boat, but everyone is going to be in a different space. I'm retiring (at 52, but want to find something else to do) in a few months. Bought a new 'gonna die in this house' for more than what I just sold my current house for. Let's say the house I bought was 700k and I sold my current house for 500k, which was paid off. I now have about $400k after all is said and done and about 400k left on the new mortgage. We could come close to paying it off and being mortgage free again.

My financial advisor says that it would be best to put maybe 200k back into house equity, recast our loan to whatever we are comfortable a month paying. If you can get down around the 2.5-2.75% rate, it doesn't make sense on paper to pay the house off. Although the market is shite atm, the money you are paying towards the mortgage could go into any number of investment accounts and earn you far greater wealth that will allow paying the mortgage down later on. Unless of course the market takes a serious dive and all that. But what goes down, eventually goes up again.

It really comes down to wanting the stability of a paid house in the weird times we are in vs building wealth with extra money that you put into the home. Our advisor supports whatever we do, but instead of paying off the house (which was what we wanted initially), we are compromising with his advice and going 50/50.