So if you were to pay off a $500,000 mortgage with a 3% interest rate, you realize you’re saving yourself 3% on that money over time, meaning a return of 3% on that $500,000 investment to pay off the mortgage.

However if you put that $500,000 into an ETF that follows the stock market, at minimum you’re probably going to make 10%-12% over time, significantly better than that 3% investment. And since were talking about $500,000, the difference could be millions of dollars over 20-30 years.

Even if you started investing 100% of what your mortgage payment would have been, you won’t catch up, and my guess is you would still be 1,000,000+ dollars short of where you would have been had you just kept paying your mortgage.