I know when we purchased our home 11 years ago,we couldn't make up our mind whether or not to pay off the bond, but we decided we would pay it off. We figured if we decided to move, it may be a tipping point. The Villages sales agents said having the bond paid off wouldn't cause our home to increase in value, as far as asking price, but if there were two homes priced the same, one had the bond paid and the other didn't, obviously the house with the bond paid off is the better buy. At the time, the break even point for our home was 11 years. In other words, if we made yearly bond payments for, after 11 years, we would have paid roughly $16,000, which was the price of our bond, but it would have been mostly interest, and we would still have owed many more years of bond payments. I'm happy we paid off the bond initially, and saved all that interest. We are now thinking about downsizing, and the real estate people say that having no bond is a selling point for at least some of the (educated) buyers.
|