New part to my question:
Is it best to only put the minimum down payment down on the new house (only 20% to avoid PMI), and take out the longest term (30 years)? When I say "best" I mean thinking of which options gets us to FIRE the quickest / which option gets us to freedom quicker.
Before I found the MMM community a few years ago, I was a Dave Ramsey listener. So I have that ingrained in my head to use the "paid off home mortgage as the status symbol of choice." AKA all debt is bad, even a house mortgage. So on my current home we had a 15 year mortgage (as Dave Ramsey recommends if you don't have the cash to fully pay up front) and I had been making extra payments towards the mortgage. That's my background.
But after reading the forums here, I have slowly become mostly convinced, thanks to
@boarder42 and others, that it seems it may be best in terms of getting to FIRE quicker, to take out 30 year mortgage (investing the difference of what we save each month because of lower payments). It's hard for me to overcome my ingrained Dave training that it could ever be good to take out a 30 yr mortgage. (scares me to think of still having a mortgage when I'm in my 60s in 30 years).
So if we were to buy a 250,000 house, before I would have put 100,000 down (or more if I were to sell stocks) to make the monthly payment less (and possibly would have done a 15-20 yr loan). Now I'm wondering if we should only put 50,000 downpayment with a 30 yr loan (and invest the other 50,000). Our monthly payment would be more, so it's hard for me to figure out the numbers as to which option gets us to FIRE quicker.
For the purpose of calculations, I am assuming an interest rate of 5% on a 30 yr loan (this is probably a little high but interest rates are rising and we aren't planning on buying for 6-12 months).
Anything else I'm missing in my calculations?