The Fruits of our Labor: paying off the house

a new sidewalk

Shortly after Labor Day we will retire our mortgage.  Completely.  Just 14 years after we put 20% down on a 1949 Cape Cod style home it will be 100% ours.  And a month later we will celebrate our 14^th wedding anniversary.  

We are the boring kind of homeowners.  We didn’t buy a house with granite countertops and a stainless steel sub-zero refrigerator – or even much besides mud in the back yard.  The faux beams in the family room stopped 2 inches short of the wall.  The homemade kitchen cabinets were hung at several different heights above the counter and every room in the house needed fresh paint.  

We didn’t take out big home equity loans to replace those funky cabinets.  Each year we’ve had some work done – with money that we saved for that purpose – and now as we approach retirement we know that we can lower our non-discretionary expenses by more than $800 a month.  We’ve insulated and replaced some leaky windows, reducing our utility costs and further lowering our monthly expenses.   

We made plenty of mistakes.  It would have made better sense to spend more on a house with less wrong with it.  We had some work done for more than it should have cost because we were too busy to get additional bids.  We had bathroom work done by a very nice man who charged little but put glass block into the wall crooked and laid the tile floor improperly so that it cracked.  A few years later, we had to start over.  But we dealt with our choices and kept on working on those improvements.  

This is a security thing for me.  A paid for house means that I have a modestly priced place to live should the worst happen and we lose jobs or our retirement accounts don’t do as well as hoped.  When my Father died at 51, my Mom had a paid for home to live in while she figured out what to do.  We could live in this house for very little money if we had to.  It’s a nice feeling.     

We have great neighbors, live a few blocks from shops and restaurants, and back onto a small park where we can cross-country ski when it snows.  We have family nearby and are approaching autumn, the best time of the year in our Midwestern city.   Happy Labor Day.