Notice Of Our Plan To Sell Property: Fill & Download for Free

My wife and I paid off our house in late 2017 and this is what happened to us.We called the bank and informed them of our intent to pay off the mortgage in full. They responded that they needed $x by 5pm to have the mortgage paid off in full. We told them to look in the one account we had at their bank and that we have already moved the money into that account. They transferred the money from our account on to our mortgage account, hence paying it off.We drove to the branch where we first got the mortgage 18 months prior and brought some cupcakes and coffee. We treated the staff because we were celebrating having just paid off the house and being 100% debt free.Our loan officer was surprised and said, “I knew you guys wanted to pay off the mortgage early but I never expected this early.” Our original plan was 4–7 years. Dave Ramsey (financial talk show host) says most working his plan pay off their house in 7 years and most millionaires pay off their house in 10 years. We were lucky to come upon an investment that took off that we were able to sell it and pay off the house. This resulted in a huge nearly $70k tax bill (answer for a different question).Dave Ramsey says once you pay off your house to go outside and walk through the grass barefoot because it will feel different. We didn’t take his advice because it was nearly winter time and snow was on the ground. Instead, my wife and I continued our celebration by going to a local fine dining restaurant to enjoy a nice meal. Emotionally, we didn’t feel different at all, it was like nothing really happened.The following month we noticed an extra $1,600 in the bank account that we moved off into a separate account to save and invest for the future. That same month we received a letter from the bank that our mortgage was paid and we received communication from the county that our deed to our house was now clear.It took three months from the time we paid off the house to have an emotional change. Perhaps this is because it was now March 2018 and the snow had melted and we could actually go outside and feel the grass under our bare feet. I’m not sure, but what happened is that my wife and I realized that we don’t need to keep on going to the same job every day. We could choose to be a baker at the Walmart Deli if we wanted to be. We could choose to be a photographer. We could choose to be whatever we wanted to be. We were no longer beholden to our job that makes a good salary so that we can afford the mortgage payment every month.This realization gave us more flexibility with our life choices and our careers. We also realized that we have been working so hard on financial goals to get out of student loan debt, save up for an emergency fund, save up for a down payment, pay off the house, etc. that we didn’t have a future goal anymore other than to save for retirement. This is when we realized that we needed another short term goal and we both decided to buy more real estate in cash and we needed to start saving up for it.Then April came along and we needed to pay our first half payment of our property taxes. Then May came along and we needed to pay the full year of our home insurance. Then October came along and we paid the other half of our real estate taxes. By this time in October we found the real estate area that we wanted to purchase in. By April of the following year we made another tax payment and we flew to the area where we wanted to purchase our next real estate and we paid cash for it in May. We also found more real estate in the same area and started saving up for that as well. We are planning on going back next year and paying cash for more property. We plan to continue doing this while we can.So what happens when you finish paying off your house? You get the freedom to make choices in your career that you might not have otherwise made and you get to invest in cash and grow your wealth. I recommend everyone pay off their mortgage and get on the path to wealth building. It is really the only way.Update: >2.5k Upvotes - thanks to all of the upvotes, I hope this encourages you to keep working hard and paying down the mortgage. Hard work does get rewarded and every extra bit of excess money should be used to accomplish this debt-free dream!

My husband and I worked really, really hard, and we built a small house. When we could finally afford to upgrade the market wasn’t great, so we rented out the first one waiting for a more opportune time to sell. I discovered that the regular income from rent was better in the long term, so I invested the profit in a small apartment building. I borrowed money and built a few more units, and eventually it became my primary source of income. This is money that pays my bills, and will put my children through college, but earlier this year the government decided that I no longer had the right to take my own properties back from people who refused to pay rent, though I was still legally obligated to pay insurance, taxes, utilities, and maintenance on the homes they were living in for free.Yes, my rights were taken away, but let’s face it, most of you don’t give a shit. You’ve had a bad experience with a landlord, so now you think we’re all assholes and you delight in the thought of our hardship. Except I’m not even a typical landlord, because I own a lot of units that are all paid off, and my husband and I have other sources of income. The typical landlord only owns one or two units, and they are not young like us. They are retired, or approaching retirement, and it took them decades to save up for their investment property. They have a mortgage on it, and often one on their own home as well, and they only have enough cash reserves to last roughly as long as it would normally take to evict and replace a tenant. Add 90 or 120 days to that, and you’ll force them into bankruptcy. Because the government wanted to temporarily protect renters and couldn’t be bothered to cover this cost themselves, they passed it onto landlords who will now be homeless themselves. They’re not just losing the right to live in a home they’re renting, they’re losing everything they’ve worked for their entire lives.We can evict now, but it’s too late for many landlords. Even in my state, where I had the assholes who took advantage of the moratorium to screw me out of my rent evicted two months ago, I know three people who had to sell or abandon their property, and one who was forced into bankruptcy. That’s obviously deeply unfair to them, but it also backfired on those tenants everyone wanted to protect. We’re in a new phase of the pandemic here, with more new cases than during the shutdown, but our government has finally realized that residential rentals is a billion dollar industry, and that all sectors will hurt from the ripples if you just take our income away, so there are no more protections coming to renters. That’s not great, because not only are we now evicting everyone who didn’t pay without first obtaining our consent and signing payment plans, but what exactly do you think happens to tenants when the landlord loses the home?You think we got investors lining up around the block to take over, when they know that the governor might suddenly decide that they can’t charge rent anymore? Yeah, that’s not happening, because you’d have to be insane to get into this business right now. If we can’t find buyers we’ll just have to neglect the property until you get sick of it and leave, or we find a way to evict you so you won’t sue us for failing to provide a habitable home. Some people still want to buy our properties, but the one I’d decided to sell to if the moratorium had been extended was going to tear down the buildings and redevelop the land – not for residential rentals, that’s for sure! And if we lose the buildings to the bank, they sure as shit aren’t going to continue renting them out, because they just aren’t set up to manage properties. They can automatically evict when they take over, so everyone will be out on their asses.We could have limited the eviction protections to people who could prove that they’d no way to pay as a direct result of the pandemic, and the government could have sent their stimulus checks and augmented unemployment directly to landlords, but they didn’t, because they didn’t care that they were hurting us. Anyone with half a brain could have told them that hurting landlords would ultimately hurt tenants, but I guess this solution was just too easy. If you look at my area now, the preexisting housing shortage has gotten worse, because enough landlords were forced out of business or quit because of this bullshit to make a noticeable difference in the supply. That means that the rest of us have more people competing for our units, so we are now raising rents and tightening our restrictions on those we won’t rent to. From now on, all applicants will need to prepay three months rent, and I won’t accept anyone unless they can prove that they paid rent in full and on time during the moratorium.We’ve had people crying in our office more than once lately, either because their brand new eviction meant we wouldn’t even consider their application, or because their previous landlord told us they screwed her over during the shutdown. One woman actually screamed about how unfair it was, and that all she’d done was take advantage of the protections the government gave her. My employee asked her why she hadn’t sought her landlord’s consent, and her answer was “because I didn’t have to, because he couldn’t kick me out”. Too many people thought as she did, and now some landlords and all tenants are going to be hurting for a long time.

My husband and I had a “game plan” for our retirement. As I was 5 years older than him, I would work until I was 62/63 and he would carry on until he was at least 60 but most probably until he was 65. He enjoyed his job and was fit and healthy.Both of us had relatively well-paid positions with a combined income of over $200,000. We owned our own home (no mortgage), our 3 children were grown up so we had finally been able to start building up a retirement portfolio. I would receive an income from my employment pension scheme and my government pension when I turned 65. Even with one income we would have no financial worries and have extra money to travel, renovate our property, etc.We decided to sell our large family home when house prices were still fairly high and purchased a significantly cheaper house in another part of Canada where we planned to retire. We found a reliable tenant who took excellent care of our home and the rent was just enough to pay our home insurance, property tax and basic maintence.Just 2 days after returning from a training course in Houston, my husband was laid off from his job in the oil industry just before his 58th birthday. We should not have been surprised as his company (and many others) were downsizing due to the consistent drop in the price of oil. As it turned out, his Department closed down completely in Calgary. He was given 1 year´s salary as compensation for over 20 years of service. Although we were pretty “shell shocked”, we figured he still had “ a salary” for the next 12 months and I was still working so it was just a matter of time before he would find a new job and life would continue as planned.After 2 years, we realized that after all the lay offs, the competition for any IT jobs in Calgary was insane - particularly if you are over 55. We finally decided that our “Game Plan” needed to be reviewed and revised. I retired from my job at 62 1/2, we gave our tenant notice, packed up our belongings into our old Audi A4 and drove across the US to our property in the Maritimes. We spent a finite amount renovating our home with a new roof and added a couple of extra rooms and now offer Airbnb during the summer. We have learned to live comfortably but thriftily on my fixed retirement pension. I bake bread, we adopted two rescue cats and we enjoy the peace and tranquility living on the river.Life does not always go as planned but you just have to make the most of it and move forward. I have always believed in “fate” - so this is what we were meant to do.