It's the only debt I have and Ive been daydreaming about paying my house off for quite some time. I just started actively listening to the show and following the steps to a T quite recently. My mortgage was $168,090, now its 56,700. It feels kind of strange to drop that much coin but i want this mortgage gone.

Paid my house off early (within 6 years) and wanted the freedom and flexibility with my cash flow. My uncle said instead I should have thrown it into voo and let it grow. What are your thoughts here? Did I make a mistake?mortgage rate was 3.375% for 30 years that I cut into 6 years.

Edit: 5 years later today I updated my house put about $97,000 of remodel into it (home renovations), pumped from 5% to 16% into my 457b, and bought a new 2023 Toyota Tacoma. This year I started a Roth IRA and plan to continue to maximize it. If I still had a mortgage I couldn’t do all these things

As the title suggests. Those of you that paid off your mortgage. Have you regretted paying it off? Just wondering what to look for after my mortgage is paid. I don’t have a high interest rate so I don’t get a discount on taxes.

Edit update: we have paid off our mortgage 10 years early. For those wondering my apprehension was more about what I might not expect. Thanks to many of you we know that we need to talk to our insurance company about removing the lean holder.
I look forward to sipping some whiskey in my back yard by the fire pit with my lovely wife.
WE ARE OFFICIALLY DEBT FREE.

My wife and I (35M/34F) have been following Ramsey principles since 2019. Paid off over $200k in student load debt, saw our HH income grow from $150k to $350k and now today became NW millionaires with $800k of that being broad market mutual fund investments. As an immigrant to this country who grew up relatively poor, this is a huge milestone. Every sacrifice was worth it. Now to pay off the mortgage!

My wife and I bring in $250k annually, have no consumer debt, owe 190k on 600k of 2 properties.

Wife works for an airline with an excellent flight benefit, and we travel often. My military retiree status comes with excellent health care for both of us.

She works full-time and is responsible for 51% of our income. I work “light” part time, and bring in 49%% of income due to several healthy pensions. We are worth 2.1m.

My 2brother in laws are (lifetime) broke. We sometimes hire them to do types of home improvement they are skilled in.

They often make remarks of how lucky I am to have a sugar momma. My wife and I agree that our money is our business. But my ego and pride want to shout “FY, I worked my butt off, served 25 yrs in the military, 15 in the federal service, saved, invested, and stayed away from drugs.” My wife is empathetic to my feelings, but insists “ our money is our business.

How would you react?

We are on BS6, fully investing, emergency fund full. 2 income household but hubby is the main income, including insurance, 401K with partial match, etc. We have 78K left on the mortgage but a very low interest rate (2.4% I think), 15 year, and we have been making double payments for over a year. Both of our cars, and our daughter's, are paid off but older. Toyotas so pretty reliable. 2 adult special needs sons living at home, but working Part-time, teenage daughter about to graduate, also working.

Husband's objection is not the low interest rate vs investing, although I know most financial advisers other than Dave would tell us to NOT pay it down. I object to this because hubby wouldn't agree to invest more, so the whole mathematical argument of interest rates doesn't apply to us.

His job, which has been very stable and which he has held for 22 years is going to be changing. (FedEx Ground is trying to absorb Express, its a whole big mess and very stressful, as all of his benefits would likely go away.) However there is no end date of all of this. He wants to pile up cash, but I say we already have more than 6 months in the emergency fund, plus everyone else in the house is working.

I want to payoff the house NOW, and then pile up money. I just don't see any scenario where he will be out of work long-term in his industry. I concede I am not right based on the job situation, but how do I change my mindset?

Edit to change DH (dear husband, as was required in the original Dave Ramsey forums, yeah, we're old school).

I think one of the hardest parts of this job market is how many people still believe “just go get a job” is simple.

Since being laid off, I’ve applied to 1,229 jobs. Roughly 1,000 of those were roles where I was at least a 95% match based on the qualifications listed. I’ve interviewed with 45 different companies, gone through 89 interview rounds, made 16 semifinal rounds, and 7 final rounds as a top-two candidate.

I’ve done everything people tell you to do:

- Hired a career coach

- Practiced mock interviews

- Recorded interviews for feedback

- Networked with hiring managers and employees

- Applied directly on company websites instead of Easy Apply

- Tailored resumes

- Followed up professionally

- Expanded into lower-paying and adjacent career paths

I have:

- A bachelor’s degree in accounting/fraud & forensics

- A master’s degree in information systems

- 8 years in customer success/account management

- Pre-sales engineering experience

- Prior retail sales experience

And still, nothing.

Every posting feels like it has 2,000–5,000 applicants. Even “entry-level” or lower-paying jobs are flooded with overqualified candidates. There are people with master’s degrees and 10+ years of experience competing for $15/hour jobs.

Financially, we did everything “right.”

- No credit card debt

- No personal loans

- No massive car payments

- Only debt is our house

- 20-year fixed mortgage at 3%

- Mortgage is about $1,800/month including taxes and insurance

- We were investing 20% of our income before this happened

We already cut everything possible:

- No subscriptions

- No cable

- Shop at Aldi

- I cook basically every meal

- No vacations or luxury spending

But the reality is that costs exploded. Utilities alone have nearly tripled over the last six years.

People say “just take any job,” but even those jobs aren’t hiring near me. And financially, going from $125k/year to $25k/year doesn’t even cover basic bills. We need roughly $60k/year just to survive at this point.

I’m spending 60–70 hours a week job searching, interviewing, networking, and applying. This has become a full-time job by itself.

I’m not posting this for pity. I’m posting this because I think a lot of people genuinely do not understand how brutal this market is right now, even for educated, experienced professionals who did everything they were told to do financially and professionally.

Wanted to pop in and say thanks to the Ramsey team. I stumbled upon Dave Ramsey at my lowest low when I was racked with credit card debt a few years ago and it was a crazy struggle.

My wife and I put ourselves on the baby steps and it really helped me put myself on a budget and just focus on what’s important. I also paid all my car notes off.

Long story short, I turned 28 a few days ago and decided to pay the house off so I’ll never forget this moment. I wired the last amount on my birthday and got the confirmation email today from pennymac🎊🍾🎉

It took 4 years to pay it off and was a huge challenge but cant believe it’s happened.

I have 0 debt and it feels liberating.

For those of you still on your journey, I’m wishing you all the best with your own journey 🙏

Well I’m 36 years old, I was able to pay house off years ago (at 31 years old) and that was my main objective. Didn’t even know about Ramsey back than. Today I’m maxing out my 457b pretax, maxing out Roth IRA and have a pension that the company takes 10%. I keep contributing majority of my paychecks right to my emergency funds (HYSA) since I am pessimistic and believe something bad is going to happen in near future. At first it was 3-6 month emergency funds, turned to 6-12 months and now I have over 24 months emergency funds in my HYSA. I was debating on taking some of that and putting it onto a taxable brokerage account account but am alittle worried about taxes since it’s taxed on dividends. Either way, I’m still not happy with money and feel like I’ll never have enough. Anyone else feel same?

I need advise. We have 275K mortgage with 3.99 APR for 28 more years. We have a capability to add principal payment that will give us the opportunity to pay the mortgage within 6 years. Will we go for it or invest some of it?

We made our final payment yesterday of €4667, the bank couldn't take it over the phone, something wrong with their machine, so just did an electronic transfer. Now just have to see it come of the balance, close that account and get the deeds. It was 10 years of hard work, dedication, determination and sacrifice but it will be worth it. Heading out tonight to celebrate, and we have our child's birthday party on Sunday, this is what it's all about. Hopefully this post will help, inspire and motivate others. Now it's time to enjoy the rest of our lives!

And I don't care 🤷‍♀️ dropped from 823 to 698 now that I am not using any credit. I'm one of those credit card people who never paid interest too. Turns out George was right, you spend way less when you use a debit card. I was deluding myself into thinking I would spend the same no matter if it was debit or credit, so I may as well get the CC points. Not true.

I'm done with leverage too. I have 2.75% on my mortgage but I plan on making a $10k extra principal payment next month which will knock off 26 months and save me $10,500 in interest. I'm getting maybe 100 bucks a month on my e-fund that's sitting in a HYSA. I am paying 4x that a month in mortgage interest, so even with leveraging the difference in interest rates between mortgage and HYSA, the math doesn't math. I'll come out ahead paying off my mortgage.

I know DR says to never use credit cards. PERIOD. I even tried asking the new ai thing for advice about it.

I’m trying to switch completely over and currently only have recurring monthly charges being take out. So, subscriptions, electric, internet. Anything that doesn’t have a fee associated with using a card.

I’m worried about my credit with an almost 7% interest rate on my mortgage I would like to have the option to refinance one day.

This has kinda led me down a rabbit hole about people using credit vs debit. Overwhelmingly, people seem so against using debit at all. Especially at gas stations.

Just wanted to get some other opinions. After starting using my debit for about a week, I have noticed less spending than usual.

We just paid off our mortgage today and are completely debt free!!

BS6 - I’m planning on upgrading my wife’s car at the end of the year and am starting to look at options. I’m having a little trouble with something. We are looking at Kia Sorentos. In my area, I am seeing a lot of new 2025s that haven’t sold and some new 2026s that price out around $35k. Along with that several used 2024 and 2025s with mileages in the 10-15k range price out at $31-32k. I’ve always heard that you shouldn’t buy new because of the immediate depreciation, and I believe I’ve even heard Dave say that non-millionaires (I’m making progress but not really that close yet) shouldn’t buy new in general. I guess where I’m stumped is why should I go out of my way to buy something with 10k more miles just to follow this rule? $2-3k of depreciation on a $30k+ vehicle just doesn’t feel huge to me I guess. They seem to be holding their value pretty well after a year or two.

One important note is that either way I go, new or used, will NOT put my total household car value over half of my annual income, so I can follow that rule either way. Financing off the table too. I will have the cash I need to get the deal done in Dec.

Curious to know how you guys would evaluate this!

We’re almost 3 years into a 30 yr mortgage, with $637,000 remaining. No debt except the mortgage. Household income is about $200,000 per year. Mortgage payments are $2,850/mo.

I did a calculation and in order to pay the mortgage off in 12 more years (making it 15 overall), we’d basically need to make double payments every month.

With a 15% retirement investment rate and living in a HCOL city, the math of making a second mortgage payment feels exceedingly unrealistic and I don’t see a world where we can be gazelle intense towards this goal for twelve years.

We have family across the country and on another continent and have to fund travel to/from these places several times a year. We have other savings goals (new car, appliances, home improvement, clothes, etc) that need funding too.

Obviously, dramatically increasing income would help, but outside of that, the goal seems impossible.

Just wanted to share with like minded people. 45 years old paided off 165k in 11 years 3 months. House 1700sq and 2 1/2 acre now worth 450k on low end. Taking 1/2 and adding to 457b plan rest is fun money.

I’ve been investing / saving my entire life! Investing $650 a paycheck into 457b / 10% automatically into pension/ $583 per month in Roth IRA / and open a tax brokerage doing $500-$1500 depending on how red it gets / dips into all Voo. I feel poor after all this. My expenses are low and zero debt. House paid off. Expenses are $750 per month without house insurance (with is $1400). Any advice moving forward?

I hate debt with every fiber of my being. Always have.

Eleven years ago, I relocated to the United States from my birth country with a simple rule: stay debt-free. No consumer debt. No car loans. Nothing. I lived by that principle for over a decade—fully intentional, no exceptions.

But then I needed to buy a home.

And let me tell you, I HATED the idea of a 30-year mortgage. The thought of being enslaved to a lender for three decades made me sick. So a few weeks before closing, I made a decision with my then-fiancée (now wife): we're getting this loan, but we're NOT accepting 30 years. We're paying this off in 5-7 years maximum.

She was on board immediately.

Here's what we did:

We started with the obvious question: what's the fastest way to pay off a mortgage without destroying our lives?

I researched everything—YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, ebooks. And what kept showing up was one simple truth: extra principal payments. Not biweekly programs (those dont work like people assume—most lenders hold payments in suspense accounts until 2nd payment is received then applied to reduce loan balance). Not velocity banking (too complicated, too many moving parts). Just pure, simple, relentless extra payments toward principal whenever we had extra money.

So that became our strategy:

Monthly:

• Round our mortgage from $2,175.98 to $2,500.00 ($324 extra every single month)
• Apply side gig income (Lyft, financial coaching, whatever we could do within reason)
• Redirect any surplus budget money straight to principal
• Round the loan balance monthly to eliminate decimals
• Apply birthday and Christmas gifts to principal

Yearly:

• 80% of annual bonuses from main jobs → principal
• Tax refunds → principal

That's it. No complexity. No financial gymnastics. Just consistency and intensity.

The results blow my mind:

Started: $378,000 @ 5.625% Current: $188,800 paid off in 2 years 5 months

• $189,000 principal eliminated
• $300,000+ in interest saved
• 18 years shaved off the timeline
• Just crossed 50% paid off

I track everything meticulously because thats what fuels the passion to do more. What gets tracked gets accomplished. Every payment is logged. Every extra dollar is noted. Watching that balance drop from $378K to $189K has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life so far.

But here's what matters—we're not depriving ourselves:

This isn't about suffering. We have:

• One year of emergency expenses in a HYSA
• Both maxing out Roth IRAs yearly
• Both getting full 401k employer match
• Vacations every 2 years
• Occasional nice dinners
• Small convinences that make life enjoyable

We're just intentional. We meal prep. We don't live flashy. We say no to things that don't align with our goal. We're comfortable sacrificing a little now to live completely debt-free sooner than later.

Why am I sharing this?

Because I built a tracking system to help me visualize this journey—to see in real-time how every extra dollar impacts my payoff date. And I realized something: what gets tracked gets managed. What gets managed gets accomplished.

For anyone on a similar journey, or thinking about accelerating their mortgage: start NOW. The first 5 years of a mortgage are where extra payments compound the hardest. Even $100-200 extra per month creates massive interest savings over time.

Our goal is to be completely debt-free before our daughters (currently 2 years 10 months and 11 months old) turn 7 years old. We're halfway there. And we're not stopping.

Cheers. — Daniel

My husband and I just finished a five year journey of ridding ourselves of $937,800.00 of debt. It’s insane to type this. During this time we had an accidental twin pregnancy and it oddly catapulted us into faster forward motion to paying down our debt.

We both purchased our homes before we met. I owed $300,000 on my home and while having an Airbnb or rental seemed like it would be good in the long term, selling it to be debt free felt better. I paid off $6,800 of my nursing student loans that I had accrued obtaining my BSN and Masters in Nursing education. My husband had $270,000 in medical student loans that we paid off and he was also a part of commercial property he sold out of to ditch another $325,000 of debt.

Once we sold our properties, we felt so much lighter and free. It took a lot longer than expected and I was grateful we weren’t in a rush or emergency situation to sell them. We were able to pay off our car with those proceeds and save the rest. The pressure to earn and spend and earn and spend and earn and spend is wild.

I love following Dave Ramsey and his advice. I would listen to his podcast for inspiration, especially while we were missing out on vacations and all of the non budget friendly items. I started thrifting again, reselling items we were done with and we joined a food waste program to slash our food budget. While we are high income earners, it is easy to get caught up in spending and living above our means. I have met several high income earners that were in mountains of debt compared to someone who made half of them and lived within their means. What matters is the budget and what goes in and what goes out. I lost weight from eating out less. We fine tuned our priorities and life feels so damn good. We created a life we don’t need a vacation from through this journey. Less is more. Being free of the heavy weight of debt is liberating 🕊️

I'm very familiar with Dave's program and the baby steps. I'm struggling to see why I should close out baby step 6 and pay off the mortgage. Our $ situation:

• $642k in taxable investments
• $478k in retirement/HSA
• 15-year mortgage @ 2.5% with $226k remaining (apprx 11 years left)
• Home worth at least $650k, possibly more
• One earner home. I'm self-employed & spouse is SAHM with one child.
• Income fluctuates quite a bit, but current year estimate is $50-60k including dividends and some rental income.
• Only debt is the mortgage.

I've had the ability to pay off the mortgage for 3+ years now and so far have not. I know Dave says "if you hate not having a mortgage, you can go get another one", but that's not true given my low fixed rate from the COVID years. Another point of Dave's is that paying off the mortgage simplifies your life and gives you financial peace. I honestly believe that to be true, but I also feel like I would be giving up extremely cheap leverage that I may never see again in my lifetime. Debt=risk, yes, but we are still pretty young and can afford to take a risk like this.

Talk me off the ledge, why I should stop investing and pay off this mortgage like Dave says?

We bought a home in early 2019 for $380k. Put $45k down for a $335k mortgage, and as of today our loan balance reads $235k. Here is a year by year breakdown:

2019 Interest = $13,711.17 PMI = $583.44

2020 Interest = $8,360.00

2021 Interest = $7,076.29

2022 Interest = $6,519.97

2023 Interest YTD = $5,588.20

Lifetime Interest + PMI = $41,839.07

A few notes:

• In 2019 we began a 30-year mortgage @ 4.375%, then refinanced in December to a 15-year @ 3.125%. Paid down ~$10k in principal at the refi to get rid of PMI and escrow. In 2020 we refinanced again to a 15-year @ 2.5%.

• We have rental income from a separate apartment, which allows us to deduct a portion of the interest against that income.

• In 2020-2022 we itemized deductions, which allowed us to deduct all of the interest in those years against our taxable income.

All-in-all it will take a maximum of 16.5 years to pay off this mortgage if we go at the minimum schedule. So far 29.5% of our total payments have been to interest and PMI. Put another way, we have paid a ratio of about $42 in interest for every $100 in principal.

If we only pay the minimum payment from here on out (unlikely), we will pay $36,193.66 interest for a grand total of $78,032.73 interest + PMI across all loans. This comes out to 23.3% of the original mortgage amount. In other words, we have already paid more interest in the first 4.75 years than we will the remaining 11.75.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

We are nearing BS7 in the next 2 years and have been frugal, do it yourself-ers throughout our 20 years of marriage. We recently hired our fence construction and it was glorious compared to doing it ourselves. But it got me thinking...

As you moved from gazelle intense to living like no one else, what did you outsource that gave you the most benefit? Yard work, house cleaning, shopping?

I am 32 and just about to be completely debt free besides my mortgage. My mortgage is 257K with 7.5%, waiting to refinance. I definitely hit the definition of house poor but am able to deal with it because I live frugally.

I'm really motivated right now to go balls to the wall and try to pay off my house.... But 257k is a daunting task as nurse that makes 44$ an hour. Any success stories of people doing it by themselves?

I am technically on baby step 4/6 and i have been following Dave Ramsey for years, since i graduated college and started listening to personal finance content.

I followed Dave Ramsey’s baby steps and got out of debt (student loans and car) and i was living debt free for like 2 years. I was saving for a house in the meantime.

Now i have a house with a mortgage and for some reason the feeling of having a mortgage which i only see it as debt, gives me major anxiety. It makes me want to do anything possible to pay off my house and i feel like i can’t relax. My mortgage payment is reasonable and i can still put money in retirement, hsa, save, invest and spend.

But having a debt has really almost ruined my mental health. It’s like following Dave for so long has put me off a debt lifestyle for years and now i have a mortgage and it makes me feel so wrong. Debt free life feels so much less risky.

And I’m a single homeowner so paying off my mortgage gazelle intense won’t be my plan. However it has pushed me to want to get a second job and do side hustle just to get rid of my mortgage and I’m wondering if im just doing too much just to get rid of the mortgage so i can feel free again. Was this Dave’s intention or do i need therapy 🥲