Liz Weston

Dear Liz: I’m 65 and my wife is 62. We recently sold a business for over $900,000 and will net somewhere between $550,000 and $600,000. Should we use the proceeds to pay off our mortgage? Our home is worth about $1.5 million with a mortgage of $390,000 at 3.586%. We contribute an extra $200 per month to reduce the principal. We have no other debt. Our savings, retirement and brokerage accounts total $1.2 million. My wife receives a pension of $483 a month and works part time as a substitute teacher. I plan to continue working until age 70 with a salary of about $170,000 per year. On retirement we should receive about $4,400 per month in Social Security benefits.

Answer: Many people feel more comfortable having their mortgages paid off by the time they reach retirement age — even when the interest rates on the loans are so low they’d almost certainly get better returns elsewhere. (The after-tax cost of your mortgage is likely less than the longtime inflation rate of about 3%.) Not having a mortgage payment can substantially reduce your monthly expenses, which means you have to take less from your retirement accounts. Such withdrawals often trigger taxes, so you essentially save twice.

Other people feel perfectly comfortable carrying a mortgage into retirement. They’re happy to take advantage of extraordinarily cheap interest rates and keep themselves more liquid by deploying their savings elsewhere. And many people have to carry debt because they can’t pay it off before they retire, or paying off the mortgage would eat up too much of their available funds.

Because you do have choices, discuss them with a fee-only financial planner. If you pay off the mortgage and invest what’s left, you could draw about $50,000 from your retirement funds the first year without a huge risk of running out of money. That plus your Social Security and your wife’s pension may give you enough to live on. If not, you may want to invest your windfall and continue paying the mortgage down over time.