Peggy and I argue about this

The last few days we had a lot of discussion about this, but we finally resolved it.  This article helped us get to neutral over this difficult issue that plagues many households.

10 Great Reasons to Carry a Big, Long Mortgage By Ric Edelman

Never own your home outright. Instead, get a big 30-year mortgage, and never pay it off — regardless of your age and income.

Now, I know that you don’t want a mortgage. What you want is a house, but to get it, you must obtain a mortgage. If you’re like most folks, you hate your mortgage, and you’d love to get rid of it as soon as possible. You grimace at every monthly payment, and you know that, over 30 years, you’ll pay more in interest than you paid to buy the house in the first place. That’s why you put down as much money as possible — to keep the mortgage as small as you could. You might have taken out a 15-year loan to get the loan paid off in half the time, and might even be making extra payments, or perhaps signed up for one of those biweekly loan programs, all to enable you to get rid of the mortgage just as quickly as possible. You do all of these things, of course, for a very basic and deep-rooted reason: because your parents taught you that you should never have a mortgage, and the key to the American Dream is to own your home outright.

Yet, a Big 30-Year Mortgage Is Best Although your parents’ advice once made sense, today it is completely wrong. In today’s economic environment, a big, 30-year mortgage is the best thing you can have. (Now, don’t confuse the idea of a big mortgage with that of a big house; I am not endorsing the idea of buying as expensive a house as you can. Instead, you should buy the least expensive home you are willing to own — and then borrow as much as you can, and for as long as you can.)

So: Never pay off the mortgage. Reject 15-year loans, never make extra payments, and forget about those biweekly mortgage payment plans. Before you dismiss all this, read on — because I’m about to show you how your mortgage can help you make incredible amounts of money.