It's amazing. I paid off my first house when I was 28 and the interest rate was 11% (I bought a really cheap, busted-up house in the 1980s). My dad said, why don't you take longer so you can deduct your mortgage interest payment from your taxes? I said, well, a mortgage deduction is subtracted from my gross income, not my final tax bill. And at my tax rate, that's only saves me 20%, at most, of what I would be paying to the bank. Why would I want to pay the bank more, just to reduce what goes to the government? He did the math and paid off his house within 2 months. The value of a home mortgage interest deduction is so embedded in myth that people don't even question it.