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I was shocked when I was talking with my grandma and she mentioned her mortgage when she bought her house was 18%. This was a couple years ago when I was looking and rates were around 4%. Blew me away.

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true, but you also have to consider the price of housing in the '80s

You'll often see financial advice websites claim that one extra mortgage payment a year will reduce your loan term by 11-12 years on your 30 year mortgage. This was technically true for a brief period in the 1980s. Not sure why this ephemeral factoid made it's way on the the early web and survived as it became less and less true over the years, but I guess it dove tails nicely with the other nonsense about the "huge tax savings" from deducting your mortgage interest*

*Was still sort of true if you had a VERY expensive house.

My parents paid their house off after 7 years, but that is quite a lot easier to do with most of your payment is high interest rates and you have a much smaller principle to attack.

Right. People were greatly incentivized to pay off the loan as quickly as possible as well as make the largest down payment they could -- unlike today

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