Yes, and we have no mortgages.
The first house was our former residence where we lived for 17 years but we moved because we had too many cats for a house that size and because my husband did not like having only a wood stove for heat. We had just paid it off when we moved.
We bought the house we live in how in 2008 because we needed a bigger house and it has central heat. We kept the other house and made it into a rental but it has been a major nightmare off and on since 2009. We had some good tenants but mostly bad ones, but I have learned some hard lessons so the last two have been excellent.
The third house we bought in 2010 with the intention of making it a vacation home and as an investment since I got it as a foreclosure for a third of the market value. I was looking to the future, towards retirement in 10 years. I had lost my job eight years before that and got demoted to a job with much lower pay because of state budget cuts so I knew I would need extra income for retirement. However, the same day we closed on the vacation house I got a new job back in my field although I had to work my way up the pay scale all over again.
The third house never became a vacation house for us to use because I never had time to deal with all that would it entail to rent it to vacationers so we rented it as a monthly rental. I have only had three different tenants renting it because the one who lives there now has been there since 2013. However he has always been behind on his rent which has caused me an inordinate amount of stress. I only allowed him stay because he kept promising to pay his debt but he never got caught up. Then with Covid and the eviction moratorium he has paid no rent since June 2020 so he owed me $18,000! Fortunately, the county rental assistance program is going to pay all of that even though he does not deserve it. I have been working on getting that money since March. They will pay his rent through the end of August but he will owe rent starting in September and I am going to insist he pay or vacate. Enough is enough.