I have a 1995 book of daily meditations, and today’s meditation began with this quote:
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Henry David Thoreau
What a timely quote for me today, as I feel the truth of that in my bones.
We met our goal of paying off our mortgage by the end of 2025 and are now 100% debt free!
I am reluctant to share about this, just as I’ve been reluctant to share about our hardest financial times, and sometimes even reluctant to share about money saving strategies.
I suppose then it was the fear I’d be looked down on as ‘poor’ or ‘cheap’, and now there’s the concern people will dismiss this accomplishment as ‘being lucky’.
I have so many emotions and memories flooding me.
I think about our house in Baltimore that we purchased at the top of the market in 2006. I began prepaying the mortgage on it and was making good progress, and then we decided to move to Israel in 2011.
We couldn’t sell it because housing prices had fallen so much, so we rented it to a coworker of my husband who defaulted on the rent and trashed it. The costs to restore it while paying the mortgage were beyond our financial capacity.
It ended up sold by the bank as a short sale. Only the bank benefited from my prepayments; we didn’t see a penny of profit from that home. We did, however, learn a lot of DIY skills thanks to all the work we did on the house. And of course we had a home to live in during those years where we made many good memories, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
We bought our current home six years ago, and notwithstanding my past experience, I again made paying off the mortgage a priority. We bought below what we could afford, a fixer upper that needed a lot of work. We put the difference between the home we sold and the less expensive home we purchased towards the mortgage principal.
We did almost all of the work to renovate ourselves, with most of the renovation expenses being spent on materials.
Every tax return that we got went to the mortgage principal.
We turned the second floor of our home into a summer vacation rental, and the extra profit went onto the principal.
We refinanced at one point, upping our monthly payments and shortening the loan length.
We did not inherit money or receive cash gifts to help with this.
And of course the background during this time was that I continued to be intentional with my spending, continued to feel content with what I had, and even as our income increased, I didn’t succumb to lifestyle inflation.
Two and a half years ago I asked my husband if I could take over the management of our finances. My husband did a fine job managing it all (even though he doesn’t enjoy it), but I find it fun and honestly, I’m really good at it.
I asked to make this switch because we had made great progress, but to knock the mortgage completely out in the very ambitious timeline that I had in mind could only happen if I was laser focused. I needed to be managing the money to have that degree of focus.
Despite having the same income and me being the main spender, we increased our savings rate by 30%. This took some deep digging, looking at every expense and paring each one down as much as I could! And every bit of that increased savings went to the principal.
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In the last year the bank website has finally been updated and I’ve been able to make the early payments on their site. For each payment, there’s an option for ‘partial payoff’ or ‘full payoff’.
This time, I clicked on ‘full payoff’, and filled in the transfer details from my bank to the mortgage bank for the full balance remaining.
And then…it was done.
No bells and whistles. No congratulatory emails or messages. It was just…finished. No physical deed to take possesion of, no mortgage note to burn. Within 30 days the paperwork in whatever office will automatically be completed.
It was almost anticlimactic.
But that was only on the outside.
Internally, I’ve had so much emotion coming up that I couldn’t sleep for hours that night and the next, thinking about different financial challenges over the last three decades.
I thought especially about the first few years after making aliyah, the most emotionally and economically trying period of our lives. Ten years ago being mortgage-free by this time would have seemed like a fantasy; I wouldn’t have even dared hope we’d be able to do this.
I AM SO GRATEFUL! Just completely humbled and filled with gratitude.
Avivah
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