Nineteen years into a thirty-year mortgage, my wife did the math out loud at the kitchen table and said something that changed the next four years of our lives.
"What if we just finished it before you stop working?"
We weren't struggling. The payment was manageable, the rate was fine, and every financial article I'd ever skimmed said there were smarter things to do with extra cash than pay down a low-interest mortgage early. Invest the difference. Let compound interest do the work. On paper, she was proposing the mathematically worse option.
We did it anyway.
Why the Math Wasn't the Whole Question
I want to be honest: there's a version of this post that's really just personal finance advice, and I'm not qualified to give you that. Plenty of smart, faithful people carry a mortgage into retirement on purpose, and I'm not telling you they're wrong.
But I noticed something in myself during those four extra years of aggressive payments, skipped vacations, and a car we drove two years longer than we wanted to. It wasn't really about the interest rate. It was about what Solomon wrote a long time ago, in a proverb I hadn't thought about since a sermon in my twenties:
“The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.”
Proverbs 22:7
Slave is a strong word. I don't think Solomon meant every mortgage is bondage. The man had a temple to build and understood large-scale finance better than I ever will. But I felt something true in that word anyway. Even a manageable, low-interest, perfectly responsible loan is still a monthly obligation that isn't going anywhere. It's a small tether, and I didn't realize how much I felt it until it was gone.
What Debt-Free Actually Bought Us
The morning after our last payment cleared, nothing dramatic happened. No fireworks. I made coffee like always and sat on the porch like always. But somewhere in that ordinary Tuesday, I noticed I was doing the math differently in my head. Not "can we afford this if the payment's due," just "do we actually want this."
That's a small shift. It didn't feel small.
The apostle Paul, not me, wrote something to the Roman church that I used to read as a metaphor about love, and now read as much more literal than I used to:
“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another.”
Romans 13:8
Love one another is the one debt he says should stay open forever, the one we should always feel we owe. Everything else, if we can manage it, he seems to say we're free to close out. I like that framing. It's not a command to be debt-free. It's a picture of what freedom is actually for: not comfort for its own sake, but the ability to give, to help, to say yes to a need without first doing math about a payment due on the fifteenth.
What This Actually Cost Us
I don't want to make this sound easy or free. It wasn't. We drove an old car two years past when we wanted a new one. We said no to a kitchen remodel my wife had wanted for a decade. We took cheaper vacations, and some years none at all. There's a real cost to this kind of choice, and I'd be lying if I said we never resented it in the moment.
But four years later, standing on the other side of it with retirement actually approaching, I don't remember the kitchen we didn't remodel. I remember what it feels like to know that whatever happens to my income next year, nobody can take this house. That's not nothing. For a man my age, staring down a season where the paycheck is about to stop entirely, that's actually quite a lot.
If you're carrying a mortgage into your own retirement years, I'm not telling you what to do about it. That's between you, your wife if you have one, your numbers, and God. But I'd ask the question my wife asked me at that kitchen table. Not "what's the smartest thing to do with this money." Just: what would it feel like to owe nothing to anyone?
For us, it turned out to be worth four harder years to find out.
God bless,
Paul