[fintstone]

The way I see it is that anyone coming into retirement with a paid-off house will not need very much to retire on...or at least a lot less than they would have. It is quite the security blanket and serves as both a tax write-off and a somewhat inflation adjusted investment. If the house payments were approximately the same amount as rent (as it is in most places), it seems a great deal. Obviously if you did not need a place to live, you could have invested the money elsewhere...but how many renters invest such a significant sum each month? My first house was paid off about the time I hit 40. If content to live in that house, I could have easily retired that day and continued to live the same lifestyle...but I opted to make more mone and chose not to. That is a choice that most folks with moderate income rarely get to make.