When we bought the house, I thought the mortgage was doable. I was working maybe 60 hours per week at the time. However, a few years ago I started a side business running clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies, and burned up a couple hundred thousand trying to make it work. Realized too late that I am not an entrepreneur – hated the business development and managing the staff. It is only in the past few months that I have paid off all my debt – hence, the 80-90 hour weeks, which I could now cut back to maybe 60 if we are careful with our spending. We had also taken out some of our home equity to remodel, which I have also just finished paying off. So, I am now back to no debt (NO DEBT – no car loans, no HELOC…!) with the exception of this first mortgage. I guess being in this current situation, back to square one, is what is causing me to rethink how I want to live. I could cut back on my hours now, but the idea of no mortgage is enticing, so we may test the market just to see if anyone is interested in our house for what we would want for it. Then, I could increase my savings quite a bit for college and retirement… I am not comfortable with so much of our net worth tied up in the home, with the market seemingly only going down… it seems like it would be a lot less risky with a cheaper house, and more diversity in my portfolio (we have a few hundred thousand in 401K (mostly my wife’s 🙂 ) but that’s it, besides our emergency fund…