How many of you under the age of 40 have at least one house paid for?

I have two houses, and am currently 43 years old. By the time I was 40, I had a paid off farm with a house. It was paid off when I was 36. I also have a house in a housing development that is not paid off. Right now, we are renting out the farm, and also have a neighbor who does the farming work for us on shares. We each pay a percentage of the costs, he does most of the labor, and we split the profits from the sell of the crops. It helps to have someone you can trust when a deal like this is set up, and I've known the guy for decades.

I bought my first house, jointly with my husband, when I was 23. We put 10% down on it, with a 30 year mortgage. When we sold it 8 years later, we took the equity and made a substantial down payment on our next house. Fortunately, home values went up a lot in that area, so we got a nice profit. Home prices might not do the same in the near future, but we were in the right market and the right time. We even had a bidding war on our house when we sold it, and it went for more than we were asking.

The key to owning a house outright is to not overbuy. The mortgage calculators say that we could get a mortgage of $290,000 right now. Instead, we decided we didn't want to ever finance over $90,000. If we had taken the huge mortgage, our payments would have been almost $3,000 a month! As it is, we never had a payment over $800. The extra money could go toward paying off the mortgage so that we could be clear of the debt. (Just for reference, at this time, I make $45K a year, and my husband makes $60K.)

The plan right now is to sell off both properties when we retire in 7 years, and then to use the money to retire someplace where we can purchase a home for cash, using our pensions, savings, and annuities to live comfortable upon.

i don't own my house outright, but i am renting it to another person and building equity at no cost!

i bought my house at 21 (may 2004) and just moved out this summer. i anticipate owing nothing on it before i turn 30. i did all of this without a parent co-signing on the loan or any gifts to help finance it.