I can understand why people might feel trapped by a mortgage. And that's a strong motivator to pay it off early. I used to be one of those people. But I found myself in a situation where I'd paid extra to my mortgage instead of building up my savings/investments and then suffered a 9 month job loss and holy crap that was awful.
I almost lost my house because I wasn't able to make payments, because I'd sent in all my extra cash as 'early payments' to drive down the mortgage.
Nowadays I just pay the minimum of $1900 every month and shove all my spare cash into savings/investing and I have a nice cushion, pretty soon I'll have enough saved/invested that I could pay off my mortgage in full, if I wanted to (which I don't).
These types of stories are helpful. A nice real life example of how it can make things a challenge, especially if you stretch to pay extra and it is not after a bunch of other uses of the money.
We do corporate moves quite regularly, and having either a small mortgage, like now, or no mortgage, like the five years before, has provided us some flexibility that would not have been as easy otherwise. It also sort of streamlines our relos a bit.
It would be hard for me to want to go back to a large mortgage, I have become addicted to the large VTSAX purchase that happens each month. The small balance we have now, sitting at 2%, is barely noticed. Now, if I fully understood things twenty plus years when we had the first mortgage, maybe we would have progressed differently. But at this point our plan has no need for a large cash out refinance to invest.
For our retirement which hopefully happens in just a few years, I have been using a model that assumes no mortgage, with the idea that we will just trade the equity in what we have for our retirement place far away from weather hell-hole we currently endure for the jobs.
Some really good info scattered in this thread.