We have 2 cars, nice home on acreage, lots of stuff. NO debts at all.
I 100% get the appeal for being debt free. My concern for my situation is my wife and I are in our 50's with her retired and me quasi-retired but in a few years plan to be fully retired. Thus, if we are to live for perhaps 3 decades, I have to contend with tons of inflation. Thus, keeping more of our wealth invested in our Roth accounts and tax-deferred accounts is very attractive to me.
Thus, I've never paid extra on the principal of our mortgage with its low fixed interest rate. When I was working I instead paid extra into our Roth investments.
Then shortly after my wife retired and I quasi-retired, Brandon entered the WH and topped Obama's promise of "under my plan electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" by making both power rates and natural gas rates go up. So I took out a low interest rate HELOC to add solar to my home and make my home more energy efficient and convert my two natural gas appliances to electric. (Basically, I substituted half of my home's future unknown energy cost inflation with a defined HELOC payment that slowly goes down as the HELOC balance is paid down.) After having solar for a year and studying the data, and since it was time to replace my wife's old crossover van anyway, I replaced it with an EV crossover (low interest rate car payment) and added to my solar. Now I have a low fixed rate HELOC payment and a low fixed rate car payment, but over 80% of our energy is supplied from solar, including charging the EV (for local driving, since on trips we charge away from home). No natural gas bill. Hardly any gasoline at the pump (we drive my ICE pickup every once in a blue moon, but 26K miles per year is in the EV, with about 22K of those miles charged at home). And only 20% of our power is bought from the grid (averaging $75/month). Basically, I don't stress over what next year's energy costs will be like, nor the year after that.
Assuming only a reasonable 3% inflation rate in the energy prices we avoid, when the car payments end (4 year car loan, I started it a year ago this month), the overall energy project will have saved my normal budget/retirement $6,000 - $7,000 more than it cost me (in making HELOC payments and car payment vs energy costs I had budgeted for in year 2019 as the "standard" for energy costs). I'll still have the HELOC balance to pay down, but with no car payment (and no gas at the pump) the HELOC will be paid down faster all while my budget still feels like the energy portion is still year 2019 (what I was paying then for power + natural gas + gas at the pump + $400/month I transferred into a car savings account to repair and replace used ICE cars with future used ICE cars and not make payments).
But the math and project engineering and financial planning to do all of that isn't worth anybody else doing unless you have the same fear of inflation in retirement that I do. And the Dims promise to keep the inflation pain strong, especially energy price inflation.