No, wait, that's the exact opposite conclusion you should be making. You're looking at a data set of all of the people who have successfully paid off their house and concluding that it's the optimal thing to do. You're ignoring the failures, the exact same thing the whole rest of your post warns about. You're ignoring all of the people who paid extra to their mortgage and then lost their jobs and had nothing to show for it after foreclosure. Once your home is paid off, it's like landing that WWII plane back at the base. Of course it's the right decision if you make it!
Actually Eric, you're talking about
HOW one goes about paying off a mortgage, not the risk factors of actually
having a paid off mortgage.
You correctly point out that there are failure modes in making early payments - a person can do that and still, if the sh*t hits the fan bad enough, lose their house AND the extra they've put into the mortgage. Fair enough. I realized those failure mechanism's by studying those I knew who actually did suffer them (lost a job, lost a house after paying extra)....so I thought "let's eliminate or substantially mitigate that failure mechanism".
One way to mitigate this failure mechanism is to save, in low risk (capital preservation / low volatility / low risk of capital loss) vehicles, the excess funds used to pay off a mortgage. In the meantime, keep making the required minimum mortgage payments. (So, instead of throwing 500 or 1k / month extra at the mortgage, put that money into a high yield savings account, CD's, or short term AAA tax free muni bonds, or what ever fit's a person's definition of low risk savings vehicle). When savings in low risk vehicles exceeds remaining balance, lump sum pay off the mortgage using the low risk savings vehicle funds.
If, as in your scenario, a person has the sh*t hit the fan during this process, they have a fat lump of cash to draw upon to continue making the minimum monthly payments - house saved, cash not wasted (still providing housing), time bought to mitigate the situation (finding a new job, selling the house without an impending foreclosure, etc).
I was ridiculed here on MMM some time ago for this very strategy, but as I said, it's a "not fail" (or more correctly, a "minimize failure mechanism") versus a "succeed" way of going about things. Enough is enough after all, and my preferred method of "minimize failure" gets me to "enough" fast enough.
It worked great for me - I did that very strategy some years ago. Here I sit, with a paid off home. I could pay the taxes and maintenance from a part - part time, minimum wage job if it came to that.....and never mind the income potential for renting out rooms, etc.
So yes, I'm a "success", but I got to success by studying those who failed, how & why they failed and took measures in the "how" of paying off my mortgage to eliminate, mitigate, hedge or minimize those failure mechanisms to the maximum extent practical.