So here's something I never thought I'd be okay with: I'm going to have a mortgage when I retire. And honestly? I've made peace with it.

For years this kept me up at night. I assumed retirement meant being completely debt-free, mortgage gone, everything paid off. But life doesn't always work that way. We've moved 24 times, and that means we've never stayed anywhere long enough to actually pay off a house. Turns out we're far from alone either - roughly 10.5 million Americans over 65 still carry mortgages. At least I know I won't be the only one at the retirement party dealing with this.

The shift in my thinking came down to one simple realization while I was sitting down to pay bills. I noticed we're paying almost as much in property taxes and homeowners insurance as we are in actual mortgage principal and interest. Which means if we paid off the mortgage tomorrow, we'd only eliminate about half our housing costs anyway. There's no escaping a housing payment - it just changes form. And here's the thing: our current mortgage rate is actually lower than what we've averaged on our investments over the past 30 years.

So I decided to stop fighting it and build a real retirement plan around it instead.

The key to making this work isn't ignoring the mortgage - it's handling everything else first. Last year I got serious about clearing out all our other debts. We've already eliminated our car payments, and we're on track to be completely debt-free except for the house within the next year. That frees up real money and reduces our overall financial obligations heading into retirement.

Then there's the investment side. The S&P 500 has averaged about 10.3% annual returns over the past three decades with dividends reinvested. Even adjusted for inflation, that's 7.6%. Yeah, some years will be rough, but over time those returns beat our mortgage interest rate. It makes more sense to keep investing than to throw extra money at the mortgage.

When I actually mapped it out on paper, the numbers work. Between Social Security, a pension, some royalties, and our retirement account withdrawals, we can live comfortably by full retirement age. We won't be rich, but comfortable is what we were aiming for anyway.

I think there's this cultural pressure around retirement and mortgages - like carrying a mortgage into your later years means you failed somehow. But the math doesn't always support that narrative. Sometimes the right move is accepting the mortgage as one line item in a larger financial picture, not some catastrophic failure. The goal was always to retire with dignity and security, not to hit some arbitrary checkbox about being mortgage-free. Turns out those are two different things.