Have you ever had a moment where you realized that something the majority of the population hold as true was actually a bad idea? You believed that idea for many years, and those telling you seemed to have good data to back their claim, so you just ran with it? But, after having someone sit down with you and show the numbers, you realized that you had been duped for a long time.
We had one such moment in 2009. We had been living in our house for two years when we finally understood some basic math about mortgages and tax deductions.
I was reminded of this when someone recently tried to convince me that we needed to keep our mortgage around for the purposes of maintaining the tax deduction - the truth that we used to believe.
I decided to finally go back and look at some real numbers. I wanted to be able to back up discussion with real facts from our own situation. Over the next few posts, I am going to walk through some of the details of the first house we lived in, and highlight how the tax deduction worked out for our income while we lived there.
