I support that. Ever heard of Dave Ramsey's baby steps? I usually lead my clients through these when I do their financial planning. And one of them is to get debt-free(consumer debt) before ever investing.

Yes, Dave Ramsey is on my local radio station here in GA. He is very good at getting people out of massive debt and he is probably one of the best. But he lacks experience knowing and teaching people how to invest and manager their own money when it comes to investing. Its very aggrevating to me that he tells people that they should invest in mutal funds and that you should not invest in individual stock. Yes I agree that its stupid to invest in stock if you dont know how to manage risk, learn how the market works and learn how to trade. The stock market is a wonderful place to make money but you have to know what your doing. But telling people to put their hard earned money in mutal funds?
Its like, well now that you worked your butt off and got yourself out of debt. Lets take the cash you have now and give it to some idiot who is going to buy your stocks at the worst possible time, then you can watch your investment tank while the market goes down and we will keep telling you that its ok, it will be fine, the market and those stocks will go back up.
What a freeking Joke. Dave- quit telling people to buy these mutal funds.

Yes David B, I can generate monthly returns from $600.00 to $1,100.00 on a 35k investment. It would not be hard to do at all.

I didn't mean to start an argument but I appreciate all the feedback.

We have decided to pay off the mortgage, so that's a done deal. We have some more discretionary income that we have decided to max out our Roth every year.

C9,
I'm not at all disputing that your knowledge of finance is infinitely greater than mine. However, the common sense part of me does not like fiat money. As you say, it's just paper, cotton actually, and its worthless. However, looking back through history, it seems that gold, silver, and platinum have always been considered valuable and therefor tradeable. Our paper currency has no real value at all, and as I understand it, its only getting worse. However, gold, silver, and platinum are used and are in fact necessities in many industries which I feel gives it an intrisic value. Or perhaps my opinion is way off base and I just like the idea of knowing that I'm actually holding a commodity in my hand. I believe it has this intrinsic value because you can do things with precious metals. You can make things and you can use them for several purposes. As it sits today, the dollar is only good for trading (for now anyway) and lighting on fire. But again, I could be badly mistaken. In any case, I don't buy thousands of dollars of metal at once, just a few ounces of silver at a time, maybe an ounce of gold every 6 months or so, stick it my safe deposit box and forget it. For now its just kind of a hobby so to speak. Kind of like our habit of buying a hundred bucks in savings bonds a month. Its not much money and we don't miss it.

David,
I'm not sure increasing our lifestyle is a problem for us. We're both very fiscally conservative. If we want something, we don't finance, we save and we buy outright. The only reason we have credit cards is so we can have some sort of revolving credit at 10% usage in case we do need to finance something, such as with a house. It's strictly a credit strategy, not a financial strategy. Thank you for your advice and I do feel good about the decision to pay off the house.

Thanks again everyone, would love to hear more thoughts.

great post, i recommend anyone to read the entire thread

And hedge funds measure time in milliseconds, investing one moment and disinvesting the next. Commentators pontificate long and hard into the night, maintaining that a history of markets is a history of waves in economies and markets that move in different directions at different times.