My Money Blog analyzes how to choose a mortgage length and his conclusion is the same I reached when I bought my first house six years ago.
Here’s the thing. Just because you have a 30-year mortgage doesn’t mean you have to take 30 years to pay it off. As long as you don’t have a prepayment penalty, you can simply send in additional money towards your loan principal and pay it off in 8, 15, or 23.5 years. However, if you have a 15-year mortgage, you have to make those higher payments every month or risk losing your home. So going for the longer term essentially sets you a “minimum payment”, which you can exceed as you wish. This can make a big difference if I run into extended unemployment or other large financial setbacks. ...I ended going with the 30-year fixed mortgage, primarily due to the reasons explained in Viewpoint #3. I am not against paying off our house early - I actually like the idea of having my home paid off as it would help simplify our income planning in retirement. (I could also treat paying it off early as owning a bond.) However, the flexibility of being able to make the lower payments as needed was a big draw, especially given the relatively small premium for doing so. Finally, if we rent the house out one day, the lower payment would also help with managing rental cashflow.
So why not a 40-year mortgage here as well? As you go longer, the mortgage payment stops dropping very much. A 40-year loan would involve an even higher rate and only lower our payment by 4%.
It doesn't surprise me that the standard term length is also the most generally advantageous. That's how markets work.
