Don't Pay Off Your Mortgage
From Zanecorpwiki
Whether to pay off your mortgage or not is a common question. The consensus is pretty clearly "keep your mortgage... most of the time" (try googling "pay off mortgage").
Why you would want to keep your mortgage is simple: it's cheap money. Whatever extra money you have which you would use to pay off your mortgage could be used for investing. If your mortgage rate is 5% and you can make 10% on investments, you make 5% more money by investing.
In other words, if you pay down $1000 at 5%, you save $50 over the next 12 months. However, if you invest $1000 at 10%, you make $100 over the same time period.
Of course, you also have to consider risk exposure, debt to equity ratios and that kind of thing, so sometimes you do want to pay off your mortgage. Another case where it makes sense to pay off your mortgage is when you don't have good investments available. Fixed return investments are (pretty much) always going to pay less, and stock market investing, while historically a good idea, returned an average of 1.3% from 2000-2009[notes 1] and are inherently risky and a poor short term investment.
