Hi All and thanks for your insights and acceptance. Me and the missus have a bit more than $1.1M in stash and yearly expenses of roughly $85K currently. Mortgage (small) will be gone in 4 more years (it's only %600/month now). coulsd be gone tomorrow--don't see the need honestly. No other debt.
I see examples of couples with significantly lower Post FIRE expenses than me & DW.
We don't live an exuberant lifestyle--we do like to go out & drink good wine, expenses that we could lower for sure. We do live in a HCOL area (Upstate NY) that we wouldn't leave or downsize.
*snip*
Should that "%600" mortgage monthly amount be "$600" or "1600" or another number? Does this include property tax and home insurance?
Don't answer this location question if it makes you uncomfortable:
Where "Upstate" are you that you consider it a HCOL? Are you somewhere around Westchester and calling it "Upstate" because you are above NYC? Or are you around Saratoga Springs-ish and in almost true Upstate before you hit the North Country? Most of Upstate NY (true Upstate, in my biased WNY eyes that see all up through Saratoga as "Central") seems to me to be high-tax but not HCOL.
That spend number seems high for any place where you have just a $600/month mortgage payment (assuming that is the correct interpretation of the typo). If it turns out that the $7K includes money to your 401k/retirement accounts, automatic deductions to your brokerage, and all of your high payroll taxes, then you might be in much better shape than it looks from your original post.
It might work well for you to look at all the actual financial activity for a recent month. Please look at your bank statements and credit card activity for July 1 to July 31. Any account that had activity, look and see what the activity was. You should be able to give us at least a rough breakdown of where that $7K goes. Obviously, more months of information would be better, but one month will be a good start. Going forward, you should consider tracking your real spending and financial activity in a program such as Mint, YNAB, Quicken, or Gnucash. Before you FIRE, you should have a VERY clear picture of what your true spending is.
Also, I think most of us would tell you that you should decide whether to pay off the mortgage immediately based on its interest rate, not its monthly payment.