I read both of what you are saying, and both of you are providing very interesting viewpoints. Thanks. I hope the two of you don't end up mudslinging this because I feel that your open discussion is very interesting.
As such, I guess after reading both of your posts, I think things are slightly more complicated for me in that
(1)My mortgage is around 5.5% fixed.
(2)I believe most helocs these days would be around 7%
(3)My itemized tax deductions are consistently phased out to some degree every year.
(4)I end up paying AMT taxes all the time which throws a wrinkle in the deductibility of mortgages/helocs.
In theory, I have cash to pay off the entire mortgage right now, except I was sort of gambling that eventually interest rates would rise to a point such that something like a CD would be above my mortgage rate such that it would make sense to keep taking on this mortgage debt. Currently, I'm divided been some safe CD's with rates below my mortgage and putting money in riskier areas to hopefully get about 8-10%. The later is to primarily beat the mortgage rate with risk, the former is to lose (slightly) but act as a small safety cushion. But what's been throwing a wrench is that with the Fed's cutting rates( was expecting it, but not that much), so are these short term cd's going south (or at least not increasing). I'm beginning to think in these day to play it safe and just pay more of the mortgage principle off sooner.
I'm not sure if this MMA scheme world really make sense for me in particular, as It appears that for me the mortgage and heloc rate would be drastically different. I mean perhaps if there's a 1% difference, but it's closer to 1.5% for me. Yet at the same time, I do have a pretty hefty principle on the mortgage to digest too ($600k to be exact). Hmmm.
