When do most pay off their mortgage?

Another good idea might be to marry late, to have children even later, and to start saving and investing early, long before marriage. I would bet that decisions of this nature have a lot more impact on one's eventual financial success than decisions about which mutual fund to buy. And deciding to stop smoking or not to smoke in the first place probably is more important than a trip to the financial planner.

The one thing I find my parents have difficulty understanding is the degree to which jobs and careers are much shorter term. My mother finds it really hard to understand that one can be loyal to the company, work hard, and lose one's job on Monday morning because of a corporate reshuffle, relocation to the Far East, etc.

This I think is a major change from their generation.

One can scrimp and save and get

Agreed.

Put it another way, your human capital is your most important asset. I grew up in a street full of Jewish refugees from the Nazis, and eastern European refugees from the communists. Not all were that well off, but they found ways to get out and jobs to go to when they got to our country. They were survivors (often quite troubled by their experiences, though).

Also savings behaviour *does* matter. Because after 55, it is the case that someone who has a good pension is probably much better off than someone who does not.

The best strategy anyone ever gave me (my brother in fact) was to pay your pension first, ie make sure that your deduction went out of your paycheque and straight into the retirement account.

If that money is invested into a low cost equity fund, widely diversified (ie an index fund) there is a good chance it will produce a decent return over the long haul. Not riches, but a decent return.

I find those who don't have good retirement savings are often the most impatient: shifting funds around, or trying to time the market.

I don't know if you saw the film 'smartest guys in the room' but they interview a lineman from one of the electric utilities Enron controlled. His entire life savings were in the company stock (a decent yielding, boring utility). Of course it got swapped for Enron stock in the takeover, and he lost everything (I think something over $300k). So there is a point about diversification there as well.

The other important point is 'neither debtor nor lender be'. I have always regretted lending money to individuals (no matter how small, even if repaid) because it frequently is not repaid, and even if it is it puts a distance between us.

And debt, other than the necessary debt to buy your first car (to get to your first job) or to pay for college, and the secured debt on your house, always seems to me to be a bad idea. To be more specific, personal consumer debt always strikes me as a bad idea-- I can never consume more than I earn, if I borrow it my total consumption is even lower. In the case of the OP, the question is whether owning a second house is a good investment-- a little different.

I looked for this data but could not find it.

What I do suspect is there has been a marked shift in preference.

The pre 1950 or so generation paid off their mortgages as soon as possible, a reaction to high real interest rates and unemployment in the 30s (inflation was negative, so your real interest rate was higher than your mortgage rate). Given where housing prices were relative to incomes, this was (relatively) easy.

Since then, housing prices have risen *and* houses have proven to be a valuable financial asset (the largest slug of most people's financial assets is probably the equity in their house) which has led to a preference for larger houses and delayed paying off of mortgages.

Real interest rates (after inflation) have been at historic lows and so the burden of paying a mortgage has been relatively low. See for example the fall in TIPS yields, as a measure of the real interest rate.

My own suspicion is that things are going to turn full circle. Housing prices are not going to go up at the same rate, and houses will be less of an investment good and more of a pure consumption good.