Thanks, justlurking. I am trying to think ahead of when we only have SS to live on, and have run through our savings. We have a fixed-rate, and it is decent.
We do have children to fall back on, but what elderly parent wants to do that! We would like to stay right where we are until we are only good for fertilizer.
What percentage of our paltry savings (bank) would make sense to put into small denomination gold and junk silver as a hedge against inflation?
You might also check into a reverse mortgage. Sometimes these make good sense - keeps you in your house but frees up cash. Doesn’t work if you had your heart set on leaving the house to the kids.
If you dump a lot of your savings into your mortgage, you will run through it much faster.
There is one consideration: how much interest are you paying right now? If you have less than 10 years left on your mortgage, you are paying much less interest per month than you were paying at the beginning of the loan.
On the other hand, if you have more than 20 years left, just paying an extra monthly payment per year (i.e. 13 payments of $1000, rather than 12 payments of $1000) will shorten the mortgage considerably. That will save you money in the long run, by reducing your total interest payments.
The key is to make those extra payments early. But as you approach the end of the loan, there's not much point in dumping cash into it unless you have spare cash. It sounds like you don't.
I think there is the possibility you could live a lot longer then expected then you would end up without a place to live.
We were able to pay our house off. We are on S.S. and a small retirement income. If we had a mortage at this time we would be in a fix.
I don't know how old you are but if at all possible make extra payments and pay it off as soon as possible. That has been a big help for us.