Mortgage Payoff One Year Ahead of Schedule

[fartface]

Typically, I share my Badassity after I've actually accomplished a bad-ass feat; however, I'm sharing my 'badass' plan in advance because I'm interested in what MMM readers think of it.

Mortgage Situation:
I've got a $59,500 mortgage balance on my home. My plan was to aggressively pay it down over the next 14 months with a target payoff date of Dec. 2015. I BADLY want to be completely debt free - including mortgage.

After reading the Credit Card churning article on MMM, DH discovered an offer from Chase Slate: 0% interest for 15 months and no balance transfer fees. We both applied and have been approved for 20K each.

Currently, in addition to retirement accounts,  I have over 100K liquid: 45K in cash (1% savings account), 35K in a Vanguard brokerage account, plus 40K in DRiPs and 529 plans.

My plan moving forward is to use the 40K from Chase and 20K from savings to payoff the mortgage in full. I know I'll still have net debt of 40k, but have the money 'en-stache' for when the final payoff comes due in 15 months.

The minimum monthly payments to Chase will be considerably lower than my current $1640/month mortgage payment thus increasing monthly cash flow.

Am I truly Badass to be using this approach, or would you do something else with 40K "free money"?

[Michread]

What's your interest rate on the mortgage? I don't understand why you have 100k in cash.  That's a waste imho. 

[Dicey]

Um, fully fund any and all retirement accounts available to me first???

[forummm]

If you're already going to pay it off within that time frame, then that seems like an OK thing to do. But you're trading off a relatively small amount of interest cost (roughly $30k times your interest rate minus reduction in taxes) for a risk that you have a serious problem and can't pay back the loan in time and your $40k loan suddenly has 29% interest.

Alternatively you could just use your pool of cash (which seems pretty large) to pay off the mortgage quickly.

[Calvawt]

i would just pay it off in the regular way.  if you were getting several hundred thousand reward points, I would say go for it.