As long as anyone is willing to loan me money at 3%, I'm going to keep right on borrowing it, whether I need it or not. The "pay off your house" mantra is for people who cannot manage money.
If someone can pay off their home...pay it off and use the money for other adventures (e.g. buy other properties, investments, business startups, reduce other debts and so on)...that's great money management.
This. A home is not nearly as much of an asset as a rental property you might own: both can gain from capital appreciation if residential property increases in value (as it normally does, over the long term), but one produces income and the other only expenses.
That's not true. You are dismissing the benefit of owning a primary residence and ignoring one important fact about living expenses. If you don't own a home, then your only other options are rental or homeless. When you are renting, you are throwing that money away to someone else as their income. So yes, an investment property can earn you income. But your primary residence helps you build networth also because it means you're not paying rent to somebody else. You can think of it as 'income retention' that transforms it from liquidity to asset, instead of the other option of being a renter and having only costs. Otherwise you're paying money that goes to someone else's bottom line and not to building your net worth. At least you can think of paying down the mortgage as paying rent that builds equity back for yourself and not money flushed down the toilet.
I've made an interesting observation on that from living in pretty much every region of the U.S.; it turns out that there are huge differences in the parity between monthly rental and mortgage amounts. In general, in most of the mid-priced areas the amount you pay in rent is almost exactly what your total monthly cost would be if you owned (mortgage plus property tax minus tax benefit of interest deduction). However, in some areas like the San Francisco area, for example, the cost to rent is significantly less than the monthly cost to own, something like 30-40% lower. This also seemed to be the case when I lived in Hawaii, although to a lesser extent and that market changes much more rapidly so it might be different now. On the flip side, in very low cost areas, i.e. small towns in the South and Midwest, it's actually more expensive to rent than if you bought that same home. So long story to agree with you and say that if you've been fortunate enough not to move around a lot you might not realize how different the rent vs own equation is in other parts of the country.
I agree with this observation, but I would add the following footnote: When making these comparisons, your observations above pertain mostly to the monthly cost of home ownership at the onset of a mortgage. Over time, this generally will skew toward being a lower monthly "real" cost, as the mortgage payment remains fixed, while (presumably) the value of the property and surrounding rent prices both increase.. Of course there are exceptions, like 2009-2010...
For sure, you're exposed to the risk/reward of depreciation/appreciation when you own. That's the prevailing theory among my friends about the inversion in the Bay Area, everyone is convinced that the appreciation so guaranteed that it's worth owning even at a far higher price than renting. Or a more prosaic view is that they're so afraid of being priced out of the market that they scrape together whatever they can to at least remain static in the market by owning. And since it's worked that way since at least the 90's (even 2009-10 just paused the increase) those of us holding out for the bubble to pop have been left far far behind.