Paying off mortgage actually makes some sense to you. Your mortgage interest is only $13K a year, you are only allowed $10K on SALT and property tax to deduct. If you don’t have large charitable donation and you itemize, you have only $23K deduction, less desirable than taking simple standard deduction of $24K. The $10K SALT limit won’t increase for inflation, but standard deduction adjusts for inflation(chain based). Maybe next year it becomes 25K, a few years later you will find it is a lot bigger than itemizing.
In another language your mortgage interest is basically no longer deductible in federal tax, even though still deductible in CA state tax.
