First of all big congrats for paying off the mortgage. It's quite an accomplishment and you should be happy.
To address the investing vs paying off house there really isn't a right answer. Over a 30 year time period (the average time period of a mortgage) the odds are greatly in favor of the investor having a considerable amount of more money. That's not a guarantee of course as it depends on a number of factors. I say doing either is better than spending your money on consumerist BS. So I won't chide anyone for paying off their mortgage early.
So far investing in the market has been a far batter choice for us over the last several years. Heck I would still be working had we decided to pay down the house instead. Yet I still toggle with the ideal of chipping away more on the mortgage. So I understand the mentality of those who do decide to pay it off early.
the menality is flawed ... investing hasnt just been a better choice the last several years investing with mortgages at todays rates has ALWAYS been a better choice since we started tracking the markets.
Depends on the time horizon. The decade from '99-2009 you'd have been better off paying off your mortgage.
Unlikely, as you'd have probably bought a house during the inflation of the national housirknng bubble, plowed money into it only to have seen the value crater, and then had to deal with your highly illiquid property being worth way less than the sum of the payments you made if you exhausted an emergency fund after losing a job during the recession.
Eh, I bought my house in '98 and could have sold it in 2009 for at least a 50% gain, probably closer to 75% gain. (Now it's worth about 350% of what I paid for it, although that did require some significant investments.) Denver didn't really get hurt nearly as badly with the bubble popping in 2008/09 as many other locales, mostly prices were just flat from '08-'11 and have been skyrocketing since. Now I feel like we're in a bubble.
Average home price in Denver in 1999 - $208k
Average home price in Denver in 2009 - $264k
SP 500 beginning of 1999 - 1,229
SP 500 beginning of 2009 - 929
Now, this does ignore the 1.5-2% annual dividend you'd have gotten for those 10 years, which would have softened the blow, although really amounts to 1% after taxes.