Why managing investing psychology of debt aversion is important for long term financial well-being

Congratulations to all those savvy investors who paid attention to valuable advices by some of us and acted timely to lock in one of the best mortgage rates in history.

Some of us managed our short term greed well and paid little bit extra in mortgage rate so as to stretch our mortgage to longer 30 years term as opposed to otherwise cheaper 15 years term. Our portfolio is likely to benefit through increased investing in stock equities (as opposed to slow growing home equity) in subsequent long 30 years through magic of compounding.

In counter intuitive way, perhaps some of us have been accelerating mortgage payment with no regard to such low interest rate opportunities. Such behavior could be correlated to so-called debt aversion (or perhaps inability to manage pain of occasional losses during investing in stock equities). Unfortunately, such behavior is likely to cost quite a bit to their long term financial well-being.

Savvy investing has to do a lot with investors psychology, especially with behaviors like debt aversion and managing pain of short term loss in stock equities investing. Financial literacy makes us smarter to deal better with such psychology.

People are prone to panic asset reallocation from stock equities to home equities during severe market downturn. I hope we had some success nudging those individuals to correct such mistake. One strategy was to refinance last year at historically lowest rate and hence start reallocating assets from home equities back to stock equities.

Remember, any time we accelerate mortgage payment, we are in essence increasing home equities at expense of otherwise increased stock equities.

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