<prompt> Human: my wife and I are in our 30s and we currently own an apartment building with 3 units. We live in one of them. We put 20 down on the 370k sale of the building so now we have about 280k in the mortage for 15 years at 3.625. We escrow-ed taxes and insurance into the monthly principal and interest payments. Total monthly is 2710. We have 2 tenants plus a garage rented out to a neighbor, combined rent from them is about 2400 monthly. So our out of pocket monthly is about 300. This is a pretty good situation except we have few big ticket items that will need to be accounted for in a new porch and tuck pointing and maybe a new roof sometime in the near future. I tried to put an extra 100 on principal every month. which is not much. My question is, should we put more into it monthly to save on the interest down the line or just ride it out with the tenants paying for our mortgage for the next 14 years. We live in Chicago so vacancy is not an issue.The hard part is that, Ive discovered FIRE early retirement and Im looking to atleast semi-retire by 40. By the good grace of high income 200k gross pay combined annually we were able to have a bit of retirement savings by maxing out 401k, Roth IRAs and HSAs every year. So annually we hide about 50K from ourselves automatically. We arent very frugal when compared to people like Mr Money Mustache but we are frugal when compared to most of our friends and peers. we do cheap stuff like rock climbing and camping and biking. Our main vices are mainly food and good wine and international traveling. We dont do much budgeting and just kind of spend as needed from our joint bank accounts. So every few months I would transfer a couple of thousand into a taxable Vanguard account our early retirement account. this is whatever thats left after paying the bills. So would you more financially savvy pfers put more of that early retirement money into the mortgage principal or just keep doing what were doing? we have an emergency fund which will get wiped out once we start on some major maintenance work on the building this year.  <response>: If you will be going down to zero emergency fund very soon which doesnt sound like an emergency if it is planned, but perhaps you just labeled that wrong, then I would not recommend paying higher than minimums on debt. You always want to have a large cash cushion, so the extra money should go to this maintenance fund so you dont have to borrow to do the maintenance.After that, the choice to pay off your mortgage before you retire is a personal one. Not everything is about optimal finances, but psychology as well. You may not sleep very well quitting your jobs while still having a mortgage, even if you have enough savings to take care of it. Or you may. If the former, then work to pay it off before you retire. If the latter, then go for maxing out all of your tax-advantaged savings accounts and other saving vehicles. 