Anyone mortgage free?

[DisneyHardin]

My last house was in an area of old homes with an independent school district, and not a very good one. Taxes on a cape cod valued at 110k were about 2200 for city and county. Now I live in a better city. My house is valued at about 160k. I also have a second lot attached, taxed at about 40k. Separately, I have 14 acres of rural property valued at about 200k but taxed as agricultural based on a value of about 50k, and a lot attached there for building valued at 10k. That property is not in a city so only pay county taxes. All that property combined brings tax of around $2500. I am in the greater Cincinnati area.

I will add that $190 of that is for a year of trash pickup.

I'm in Louisville. The $1500 is our Jefferson County taxes and then we do pay about $200 more per year because we are in one of the smaller, class D cities within the city, but that $200 pays for our trash/recycle/yard waste pick up, so it is about break even for if we had to pay it ourselves.

 

[crisi]

Our financial advisor advised us not to be mortgage free when we downsized for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that at the time mortgage rates were really low (ours is less than 4%) and our investments were going well (around 8%).

I remortgaged our paid off house and put the money into investments sometime after the housing crisis. Interest rates were low and stocks were on sale. (there is a more complicated version of that story that involves some time owning a second home, but that's the end result). Because I remortgage for only a small portion of our home's worth, my mortgage payments are $300 a month