Thanks everyone for your kind words. I appreciate it.
We have six kids. All six were home when we paid it off. A few months later my oldest left home. It has made it so my kids have been taught much better about money. We also took the kids on a cruise to celebrate paying our house off. And yes we paid cash for the cruise.
What you did is awesome! I might copy your method of putting up a chart to stay focused on our future goals. Good on you for celebrating paying off your house! We haven't done anything big to celebrate our mortgage payoff yet. I want to wait for next paycheck before we celebrate.
Ha! You want to see bloodsucking, just watch what happens if you can't pay your taxes. A paid-off mortgage does not mean the end of payments. Utilities and property taxes never go away. Better to have a bunch of money available for things that wear out or break, plus property taxes, which are guaranteed to increase steadily over the long haul.
You are absolutely right. This is not the end of payments. However, I had enough of a cushion to be able to pay off the house. I just didn't feel like needlessly paying interest to the bank when I am not going to drop $100k which I have sitting in a CD, into the stock market. It did not make any financial sense.
Now, I still think the logical thing to do would be to invest in the market, which is very likely to do better than 3%, but I just couldn't do it. I wanted to be debt free. This is not something I can explain with logic. :)