Dave Ramsey in his book total money makeover compares baby step 6 | “paying off your mortgage” to running a full on marathon.

Anyone ever run a marathon?

I have one time. It took so much training, grit, and determination.

There were some years I trained, and only could run 18-19 miles before I just hit a wall.

My nutrition was all off. I got dehydrated, started walking at mile 19, and really told myself in my mind that it was probably “good enough.”

I could say, “yep, I have run 19 miles to my friends, but I knew in my head that was never my goal!!”

My goal when I set out training for a marathon was to run the full 26.2 miles. You know what? I could never train for a full marathon on my own. I needed help.

How I finished my marathon

I finally finished my marathon all 26.2 miles in Newport Beach, CA May of 2019.

I didn’t finish because of anything special about myself. I finished that marathon, because I pursued people further along than I was.

I joined a group of actual marathon runners. All these women had ran a marathon before and were training for yet another 26.2 miles.

I showed up every Saturday to the training runs, nutrition talks, and runs dedicated to fundraising for children with cancer.

I had found my “why,” and I had also found my “people” who were there with me helping me finish all my training run miles.

My “why” was because life is just too short to waste.

Children had died of cancer, and some were still fighting at the children’s hospital.

Yet, one couple after losing their 7 year old child, didn’t give up. Instead, they started a marathon training group to continue the memory of their very loved child who died of cancer.

These parents helped people like me train for a race and taught me how to achieve my dreams, because they knew that their child never would be able to, and they wanted to see others dreams come to pass.

These training runs were all about people unselfishly helping other people.

They were about people living life for so much more than just their own selfish pursuit of success.

I was a hot mess when I first joined this group of runners. My father passed away completely unexpectedly a few months before I joined the group of angels.

In my grief, I honestly don’t know how I trained and completed this race, but I did it.

My dad was a marathon runner in many ways. He was one of the most financially fit human beings I ever knew.

He had done ALL the right things. He paid off two houses. He invested in land, mutual funds, timber, Roth IRA’s, had a pension.

Yet, God decides each of our fates, and He decides our time to go home. At the age of 64, right when he was getting ready to cash in on that retirement savings, he passed away.

Just keep running your own race

I remember wondering how I could ever be a marathon runner like my dad was in the financial world.

Honestly, the first step for me was I had to BELIEVE in myself and my truth. I had to run my own race. I had to acknowledge that it was okay that my truth wasn’t the same as anyone else’s.

I learned this the first time I ran past 18 miles and ran 22 miles. My friend in the training group said to me, “I have run marathons many times, and the trick is to run your own pace. You can’t look to the left. You can’t look to the right. You can’t be so focused on who is passing you that you mentally give up your own race. You have to look straight ahead. Look towards your goal, and run your own race. This marathon is for you. It’s for you to run in memory of your father passing away. This isn’t for anyone else.”

That was a game changer for me. I think I repeated many times when I was running my marathon, “I have to run my own race.”

I can be a fairly competitive person at times. I wanted to run with the faster women during the marathon, but in order to finish my marathon, I couldn’t. I had to run my own race.

Now how does all this information about marathon running have to do with finances?

Dave Ramsey says it best. When you get to baby step number 6: pay off your mortgage, it feels like your running a marathon.

In order to really finish running a marathon, one has to “know where you are weak, and take action to make sure you don’t fall prey to the weakness. A big part of being strong financially is knowing where you are weak” Dave Ramsey.

For me, often my own weakness is in comparison. I see someone else using debt to buy the most expensive biggest home, get all the things, the luxury vacations, and I want to do the same.

I see them buying a house with only a 5% down payment, and I think, can that just be me too?! I want the half a million to a million dollar house too.

But I’ve leaned that even low percentage interest is still debt we are paying that offsets our potential later on in life. So it’s best not to have.

“Mortgages are the most expensive debt we all carry. At an interest rate of even 3%, it is a lot of money that gets tacked on in interest every month and year with the time value of money” Hank Coleman.

That means for each month I’m paying my mortgage, I’m giving money away in interest that I will never see again.

I am pretty smart when it comes to knowing my numbers, so we have a 20 year mortgage, at 3%.

Low interest and low number of years, but even at that, we still will pay exactly $127,791 in interest over the life of our home if we decide to make our payments on time and on schedule, not paying any of our mortgage off early.

Now, for example, my friend in the example with the larger home and smaller down payment will pay over the life of their loan $297,162 in interest.

Will they make it up some other way? Maybe their house will grow in equity faster because it’s in a nicer neighborhood. Maybe?

But I need to run my own race. You need to run your own race too.

I know for us by trying to work towards our goal of paying off our mortgage, in the end it will all work out.

The feeling of satisfaction we will get by accomplishing our goal can’t be compared to anything else. Right now, I’m just envisioning what that will look like and how that will feel. Changing our future, by having less payments will all be worth while, even if it’s a very lofty long term goal.