TooFarTampa said:
Recently I read a brief article in Florida Realtor, Jan 2006, p8, entitled "Mortgage Free," which stated that the US Dept of Housing and Urban Development and the US Census Bereau reported "that close to 40% of the nation's residential properties do not have mortgages." This covers owner-occupied homes and rentals. The name of the report is "Residential Finance Survey: 2001."
I know that number has changed since in the last five years due to many people taking out home equity loans, but I thought the article was relevant to this discussion. You can learn more at www.HUD.gov
at the idea of me/us being "bullish" investors. We are quite conservative and highly diversified, believing in diversified long-term high yield mutual funds and "blue chip" stocks combined with bonds and cash instruments, real estate holdings via the strategy of location/location/location and contained in low-interest, fixed-rate mortgages, absolutely no debt but for those mortgages, and having an annual budget that we live well within at all times. We have learned from friends more affluent than us what the very wealthy have always known, that one can have many of life's luxuries at very minimal or even no cost. For example, we travel often and usually first-class, seldom purchasing an airline ticket, because we put every possible expense on a credit card offering air miles and pay the balance each month. I enjoy a week at Canyon Ranch every year, compliments of a little investment portfolio that yields the cost of the trip and then some, an investment made with that goal in mind. We are not necessarily market savvy investors, but we like to sleep nights and plan to fully retire early in life.
