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Does anyone remember Mortgage Burnings?

LVPaladin
@KenLange
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Does anyone remember Mortgage Burnings? Google says "Mortgage burning was a twentieth-century custom."

My wife and I made the final payment for our house in July, and yesterday we finally received confirmation from our creditor that the mortgage was paid off. It came as a packet of forms in a full-size, non-descript manilla envelope.

We were able to pay our house off in 21 years. This was made possible by refinancing to improve our rate when the prime rate rolled around to friendly territory, and by making a half payment every two weeks. My wife was the impetus behind both of these actions. She is a killer money manager. It is my earnest hope for all the wedded unions out there that one — and trust me, it is better if it is only one — of you is this person, and the other recognizes the value in it.

So unlike in the 20th century, I immediately scanned it to PDF and put a copy in our secure cloud. And the original goes in our fireproof safe. I will ask my wife if she wants me to print out a copy of the PDF to use at a mortgage burning party. These are kind of like housewarming parties at the other end of life. You can see one in an episode of a number of that century's classic shows: All in The Family, Mayberry RFD, Eight is Enough, M*A*S*H, and other TV hits of the '70s and '80s.

Did I mention I am an unrecovered Boomer?

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Discussion (21)

  • kedavis@kedavis

    These days, it's probably more important to have proof of a mortgage being paid off. Since otherwise whatever the bank/whatever has, might be considered incontrovertible proof of a mortgage if someone wanted to commit fraud on you.

    And a reminder: there is no "cloud," it's just someone else's computer.

  • Douglas Pratt@DouglasPratt
    Near my home is a wonderful U-Pick apple orchard with 350 varieties of apples on six acres. The owners can tell you stories about every one. One variety is named The Mortgage Lifter. The tree produced fruit so popular it paid off the farm mortgage. (The original farmer who planted the tree, not my friends' orchard.) Since apples don't "come true" from seed, you don't know what kind of fruit a tree grown from seed will produce. Every variety that survives is grafted from the tree that produced fruit people wanted. There is one Granny Smith tree, in Australia, where all Granny Smith apples come from via grafting, usually onto dwarf root stock these days.
  • Douglas Pratt@DouglasPratt
    ReplyingtoNohaaj

    Nohaaj (View Comment):

    Congrats! Truly a milestone inlife.

    Now if only we could stop paying the perpetual real estate use tax for the property we own.

    Hear hear. Our home has an absurdly high property tax, as do all the homes in New York because of the state law mandating that local governments pay for Medicare/Medicaid. It takes 85% of the county budget right off the table, leaving 15% to fix roads and water pipes. Stinks.

    And congratulations on the major financial event!

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