My wife and I are a little torn.
We made good money for the last few years. Saved a good deal of it. We recently decided to slow things down a little for more family time, and cut out a good portion of our income. I now have an income of 40k for 3 months of work. Wife stays home with the kiddos. Not sure what the other 9 months will bring in for me.
We have a house we bought for 270k, and took out a loan for 215k. Paid it down the last few years to 190k. We have no other debt, the house is in very good repair, and we are not anticipating any big expenses soon. We have a monthly payment of approx $1300, including taxes and insurance. We are locked into a 3.85% 30yr rate. A $1300 mortgage payment makes us a bit nervous, but we love our house, and it's appreciating yearly in a small town in Alaska. So, this is the dilemma we are having. We can sell some commercial fishing permits that could potential appreciate and use a bunch of our cash and make approx a 120k payment on the house, refinance it, and end up with about a $600 monthly mortgage payment at 4.5%. (stretch it back out again) We don't have enough to pay the entire house off, but we are frugal and savers, so we'd work hard at getting it paid off. But, that would mean giving up a great deal of cash and assets that we could potentially put to work.
What would you do? We go back and forth. On one hand, we'd love to live in hour house for $600 a month. On the other hand, it's tough to give up the cash/assets.