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HOME OWNERSHIP
The Best Part of Being Mortgage-Free? Doing Whatever the Hell I Want
After 35 years and four houses, I finally own my home outright
The other day I signed onto my credit union’s site and saw that my mortgage balance was $0.
This surprised me, because I had expected it to take one more month. But they lumped the odd leftover amount in with the last full payment. So I sat here in front of my laptop and just looked at that $0 for a while, making sure I was reading it right.
It was hard to believe, even though I’d been working toward that moment since August of 1990.
It felt kind of like when the lady at the health department told me my pregnancy test was negative. I was stunned and sad — I’d been so sure I was pregnant. And then she looked at it again and declared it was positive. It was sort of an unreal feeling: Am I really pregnant? (Yes, I was. He just turned 33).
It has been a long road, one a lot of younger people will never travel
In most of the country, housing costs have exploded and coming up with a down payment is an impossible dream, let alone actually owning a house mortgage-free. In my case, it took 35 years, two marriages…
