The "don't pay your house off" crowd here at MMM would probably encourage you to keep the mortgage and invest that money instead. You'll need a higher income but will have higher assets. I'm personally in the "no debt or mortgage in ER" club myself but ymmv. Lots of threads around about both.
Debt sucks, IMO. I'll pay the minimum for the next 15 years, but once I'm at FI I'll probably take out some $$ and pay off the mortgage. Hell, I might even time the market by doing that on an upswing rather than a dip. Shocking, I know :-)
Don't forget that while you must live SOMEWHERE, you do not need to retire where you are. If you have $125,000 equity in your home now, for example, you could sell your current home and retire to a very nice home, paid in cash, in about 30-40% of the US. Keep running the numbers. You might be over half way there already.
Isn't that interesting, you just went from hopeless to half way there in just a couple of posts :)
Oh man you have no idea how much of a life saver MMM was for me. Not just money either. A complete re-alignment of my perceptions of this world and my place in it, and what's important. I used to want to have a "nice life" because my parents were poor during the early parts of my life and it set me to separate myself from "poor people" by spending money and showing I had made it.
Small example - recently I was eating some oatmeal for breakfast and I was scraping the poot to et the last bit out. I would have never have done that in the past because "poor people scrape". Now my mentality is "non-wasteful rich people DO scrape". Haha, that's quite a shift!
I also notice more recently, as we've gotten to around $300k invested, that my desire to buy shiny things is dropping almost in directly inverse proportion to the amount of money I actually have. It was like, when I was not wealthy (no savings), I wanted to give the impression of wealth by having new/shiny things. Now that I have ACTUAL wealth, the desire to show it off just drops like a rock.
Anyway, I owe a HUGE thanks to MMM and especially to the people on this forum. MMM got my mindset turned around with his blog posts, but it was the members here that help people methodically work out the real-world applications that was the final piece of the puzzle. So... THANK YOU ALL!