Once you get the kids raised and the mortgage paid off and accomplish what you wanted to do in life, there's a great feeling of: 'Hey, I'm free as a bird.'
I live in a Spanish-style hillside home in Los Angeles, California. I paid $900,000 in 1995. It's perhaps worth about $3m now. Thankfully, I paid off my mortgage before the crash because I could see it coming. I worried that I would be caught having to pay off a very high mortgage for a house I couldn't sell.
If I get married I get a tax break, if I have a kid I get a tax break, if I get a mortgage I get a tax break. I don't have any kids and I drive a hybrid, I think I should get a tax break. I'm trying to pay off my apartment so I have something tangible. I actually figured out if I paid off my place my reward would be that I would pay an extra four grand a year in taxes.
We paid for this instead of a generation of health insurance, or an alternative energy grid, or a brand-new system of roads and highways. With the $13-plus trillion we are estimated to ultimately spend on the bailouts, we could not only have bought and paid off every single sub-prime mortgage in the country (that would only have cost $1.4 trillion), we could have paid off every remaining mortgage of any kind in this country - and still have had enough money left over to buy a new house for every American who does not already have one.
Once I started fighting in UFC, things took a big U-turn. After my second fight, I came home and paid my mortgage off.
I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.
If you pay off your mortgage before retirement, you take a huge financial load off your shoulders. You also become eligible to take out a reverse mortgage once you turn 62.
I hope that basketball gains momentum and kids understand that you can actually make a living from it. Not just the N.B.A. You can get a scholarship, a free degree - like, no student loan you have to pay off. That's huge in life. Once they realize that in New Zealand, I hope they get inspired.
Thirty-nine was the best year of my life earnings-wise. I paid off my mortgage and felt a massive sense of achievement.
I wanted to be a therapist if the acting didn't work. I also did a lot waitressing and odd jobs. I'd audition but couldn't get hired to save my life. I'd do Off-Broadway theatre and that was great and I was excited and thrilled, feeling like, 'Well, it's Off-Broadway, but there's still the Broadway in there.'
If you build a car, you can only sell it once. If you paint a fence, you only get paid for it once. If you create a piece of software that's essentially free to reproduce, you can keep getting paid over and over perpetually.
I've always paid off my mortgage as much as I could.
The very success of the modern American family - where kids get punctually to SAT-tutoring classes, the mortgage gets paid, the second-story remodel stays on budget - surely depends on spouses' not being in love.
As soon as I paid the mortgage off in 1988, I started racing cars.
The paid-off home mortgage has taken the place of the BMW as the status symbol of choice.
My two boys were the same ages as the kids in the show. In real life or in between the breaks I was raising two kids off camera who were not unlike the two kids who were being paid to be my kids.
You hear entertainers all the time, saying, 'If I couldn't get paid for this, I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say, 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum, I'd do it for free'?