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Trinity Owen and her husband bought their four-bed, three-bath home in East Concord, New York, in 2019, and they quickly began sending extra money toward their mortgage to pay it off early. Then the couple did some simple math.

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They compared what their extra payments on the mortgage would save them in interest, versus what that same amount invested in the stock market could grow to in 25 years at the average annual market return rate.

“The difference shocked us,” says Owen, who is a digital marketer. “We no longer pay a dime more on our mortgage, even though we could pay it off from our investments more than twice over.”

The Owens discovered something that financial planners already know: Sometimes it doesn’t pay to pay off a mortgage early.

The surprising advice: Keep the debt

For many, being debt-free is the ultimate goal. But aggressively paying off a low-interest home loan can actually do less for your long-term wealth than other financial moves, like tackling higher-interest debt, investing in the stock market or saving for retirement.

“It usually doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay off, say, a 3% mortgage early,” says Tyson Sprick, a certified financial planner with Caliber Wealth Management in Overland Park, Kansas. You could put that cash in a money market account right now, he says, and earn more than that.

The perks of keeping a mortgage

Carrying a mortgage has other advantages.

For one thing, keeping cash available gives you more flexibility. Melissa Caro, a CFP based in New York City and founder of digital platform My Retirement Network, reminds clients that if they pay off their mortgage, all that money is tied up in the house.

“Once you give that money away to the bank, it’s theirs, you can’t have it back,” Caro says. If you need funds for a major repair or emergency, she says, you may end up borrowing again or selling investments that could trigger taxes.

Another plus: Your mortgage interest may be deductible if you itemize on your taxes. “The higher your income is, the more valuable that deduction is, and it does make a huge difference in some cases,” Sprick says.

When paying it off makes sense

That said, holding onto home debt isn’t always the optimal plan. If you’ve got a high-interest mortgage and enough cash to pay it off early, your financial planner might give you the green light. It might also be advisable to work on the debt if you’re nearing retirement — a life stage when owning your home outright can be especially useful.

The question, Sprick says, is whether people have enough cash to pay off their mortgage and pursue other goals at the same time. Are you able to attack your home loan while also putting money away for college and keeping your emergency fund intact?

If you can zero out the mortgage, Sprick says, but it leaves you with nothing left in your bank account, it’s better to wait. “You have to leave yourself some liquidity,” he says.

The emotion of debt

The wild card in all this math is that financial decisions aren’t 100% rational. Money is tied to emotion and feelings of control, and some people just want their debt gone.

“Many people find the idea of living with no debt empowering,” says Josh Brooks, a CFP with Exponential Advisors in Weatherford, Texas. “It’s about financial freedom and peace of mind, more than the numbers alone.”

Still, putting feelings over math might mean you earn less over time, have less liquid cash and make less progress toward other financial goals.

“There are some people who say, ‘I don’t really care, I just want it gone. I just want that feeling of not owing anybody anything,’” Sprick says. From a financial standpoint, it may not be the ideal move, “but life is more than just a spreadsheet.”

The bottom line

In the end, everyone’s situation is different, and you have to make the best decisions for your own finances. If you’re unsure of the best approach, talk to a financial professional.

The good news is that you don’t have to be stressed if you’re paying off a low-interest mortgage for the next few decades — it might be the kind of smart money move financial planners often suggest.

For Owen and her husband, keeping their home loan has allowed them to invest in scaling her online jewelry business, and also to invest in stocks and local real estate.

“Our future would look very different if we had unwisely paid off our mortgage instead of using that money in what we believe are better ways,” she says. “This mindset has greatly changed our perspective on paying interest for necessary purchases.”

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Kate Ashford, CSA® writes for NerdWallet. Email: kashford@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @kateashford.

The article Why Your Financial Planner Might Tell You to Keep the Mortgage originally appeared on NerdWallet.

By MICHAEL CASEY and GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge in Boston on Thursday will consider a motion that would require the Trump administration to continue funding the SNAP food aid program despite the government shutdown.

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The hearing in front of U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani comes two days before the U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because it said it can’t continue funding it due to the shutdown.

The program serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net. Word in October that it would be a Nov. 1 casualty of the shutdown sent states, food banks and SNAP recipients scrambling to figure out how to secure food. Some states said they would spend their funds to keep versions of the program going.

The program costs around $8 billion per month.

The administration said it wasn’t allowed to use a contingency fund with about $5 billion in it for the program, which reversed a USDA plan from before the shutdown that said that money would be tapped to keep SNAP running. The Democratic state attorneys general or governors from 25 states, as well as the District of Columbia, who challenged the administration’s plan argued that not only could that money be used, it must be. They also said a separate fund with around $23 billion could be tapped.

In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that failing to maintain the SNAP funding was illegal, arbitrary and capricious, and would irreparably harm them. They also said cutting off the benefits would “cause deterioration of public health and well-being” of recipients, and that those costs would be borne by the states.

“With the suspension of SNAP benefits, the nutritional needs of millions of school aged children in Plaintiff States will not be met,” plaintiffs wrote. “Hungry children have a harder time paying attention, behaving, and learning in school. States will have to devote additional state resources, including healthcare expenditures and additional educational resources, to address these challenges.”

Plaintiffs also argued that more than 100,000 merchants in their states that rely on SNAP recipients would be harmed.

“With the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, on information and belief, many of these retailers will have purchased a greater amount of food and inventory to match the holiday demand,” they wrote. “Without SNAP funds, SNAP recipients will not be able to frequent retailers, causing a significant loss in revenue, increased food waste, and a negative impact on Plaintiff States’ economies overall.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how quickly the debit cards that beneficiaries use to buy groceries could be reloaded after the ruling. That process often takes one to two weeks.

To qualify for SNAP in 2025, a family of four’s net income can’t exceed the federal poverty line, which is about $31,000 per year. Last year, SNAP provided assistance to 41 million people, nearly two-thirds of whom were families with children, according to the lawsuit.

Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, New Jersey.

By ARIEL FERNÁNDEZ, ANDREA RODRÍGUEZ and JOHN MYERS JR., Associated Press

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba (AP) — People across the northern Caribbean were digging out from the destruction of Hurricane Melissa on Thursday as deaths from the catastrophic storm climbed.

People stay inside a shelter for families displaced by gang violence, flooded by rain brought by Hurricane Melissa, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)

The rumble of large machinery, whine of chainsaws and chopping of machetes echoed throughout southeast Jamaica as government workers and residents began clearing roads in a push to reach isolated communities that sustained a direct hit from one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record.

Stunned residents wandered about, some staring at their roofless homes and waterlogged belongings strewn around them.

“I don’t have a house now,” said a distressed Sylvester Guthrie, a resident of Lacovia in the southern parish of St. Elizabeth, as he held onto his bicycle, the only possession of value left after the storm.

“I have land in another location that I can build back, but I am going to need help,” the sanitation worker pleaded.

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Emergency relief flights began landing at Jamaica’s main international airport, which reopened late Wednesday, as crews distributed water, food and other basic supplies.

“The devastation is enormous,” Jamaican Transportation Minister Daryl Vaz said.

Some Jamaicans wondered where they would live.

“I am now homeless, but I have to be hopeful because I have life,” said Sheryl Smith, who lost the roof of her home.

Authorities said they have found at least four bodies in southwest Jamaica.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness said up to 90% of roofs in the southwest coastal community of Black River were destroyed.

“Black River is what you would describe as ground zero,” he said. “The people are still coming to grips with the destruction.”

More than 25,000 people remained crowded into shelters across the western half of Jamaica, with 77% of the island without power.

Death and flooding in Haiti

Melissa also unleashed catastrophic flooding in Haiti, where at least 25 people were reported killed and 18 others missing, mostly in the country’s southern region.

A woman lies inside a shack flooded by rain brought by Hurricane Melissa at a shelter for families displaced by gang violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)

Steven Guadard, who lives in Petit-Goâve, said Melissa killed his entire family.

“I had four children at home: a 1-month-old baby, a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old and another who was about to turn 4,” he said.

Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency said Hurricane Melissa killed at least 20 people in Petit-Goâve, including 10 children. It also damaged more than 160 homes and destroyed 80 others.

Officials warned that 152 disabled people in Haiti’s southern region required emergency food assistance. More than 11,600 people remained sheltered in Haiti because of the storm.

“It is a sad moment for the country,” said Laurent Saint-Cyr, president of Haiti’s transitional presidential council.

He said officials expect the death toll to rise and noted that the government is mobilizing all its resources to search for people and provide emergency relief.

Slow recovery in Cuba

Meanwhile, in Cuba, people began to clear blocked roads and highways with heavy equipment and even enlisted the help of the military, which rescued people trapped in isolated communities and at risk from landslides.

People recover belongings from a home flooded by Hurricane Melissa in Santiago de Cuba, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Ramón Espinosa)

No fatalities were reported after the Civil Defense evacuated more than 735,000 people across eastern Cuba. They slowly were starting to return home.

The small, iconic town of El Cobre in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba was one of the hardest hit by Hurricane Melissa.

Home to some 7,000 people, it is also the site of the Basilica of Our Lady of Charity, patron saint of Cuba and deeply venerated by Catholics and practitioners of Santería, the Afro-Cuban religion.

“We went through this very badly. So much wind, so much wind. Zinc roofs were torn off, some houses completely collapsed. It was a disaster,” said Odalys Ojeda, a 61-year-old retiree, as she looked up at the sky from her living room where the roofing and other parts of the house were ripped off.

Even the Basilica was damaged.

“Here at the sanctuary, the carpentry, stained glass and even the masonry suffered extensive damage,” Father Rogelio Dean Puerta said. “The town was also badly affected. Many people lost their homes and belongings. We need help.”

In the more rural areas outside the city of Santiago de Cuba, water remained accumulated in vulnerable homes on Wednesday night as residents returned from their shelters to save beds, mattresses, chairs, tables and fans they had elevated ahead of the storm.

A televised Civil Defense meeting chaired by President Miguel Díaz-Canel did not provide an official estimate of the damage. However, officials from the affected provinces — Santiago, Granma, Holguín, Guantánamo, and Las Tunas — reported losses of roofs, power lines, fiber optic telecommunications cables, cut roads, isolated communities and losses of banana, cassava and coffee plantations.

Officials said the rains were beneficial for the reservoirs and for easing a severe drought in eastern Cuba.

Many communities were still without electricity, internet and telephone service due to downed transformers and power lines.

A historic storm

When Melissa came ashore in Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane with top winds of 185 mph on Tuesday, it tied strength records for Atlantic hurricanes making landfall, both in wind speed and barometric pressure. It was still a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall again in eastern Cuba early Wednesday.

A hurricane warning remained in effect Thursday for Bermuda. An earlier warning for the central and southeastern Bahamas was lifted but the U.S. weather agency warned of additional rainfall up to 10 inches.

Hurricane conditions were expected to continue through the morning in the southeastern Bahamas, where dozens of people were evacuated.

Melissa was a Category 2 storm with top sustained winds near 105 mph Thursday morning and was moving north-northeast at 21 mph according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

The hurricane was centered about 295 miles northeast of the central Bahamas and about 605 miles southwest of Bermuda.

Melissa was forecast to pass near or to the west of Bermuda late Thursday and may strengthen further before weakening Friday.

Rodriguez reported from Havana and Myers Jr. reported from Kingston, Jamaica. Associated Press reporters Dánica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and David Constantin in Petit-Goâve, Haiti, contributed to this report.

By ALI SWENSON and OBED LAMY, Associated Press

MINOOKA, Ill. (AP) — Bill Swick has a rare degenerative brain disease that inhibits his mobility and speech. Instead of the hassle of traveling an hour to a clinic in downtown Chicago to visit a speech therapist, he has benefited from virtual appointments from the comfort of his home.

But Swick, 53, hasn’t had access to those appointments for the last month.

Bill Swick looks at his wife Martha Swick at their home in Minooka, Ill., Friday, Oct. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

The federal government shutdown, now in its fifth week, halted funding for the Medicare telehealth program that pays his provider for her services. So, Swick and his wife are practicing old strategies rather than learning new skills to manage his growing difficulties with processing language, connecting words and pacing himself while speaking.

“It’s frustrating because we want to continue with his journey, with his progress,” 45-year-old Martha Swick, a caregiver for her husband since his diagnosis three years ago, said during an interview at their home in Minooka, Illinois. “I try to have all his therapy and everything organized for him, to make his day easier and smoother, and then everything has a hitch, and we have to stop and wait.”

Their experience has become common in recent weeks among the millions of patients with Medicare fee-for-service plans who count on pandemic-era telehealth waivers to attend medical appointments from home.

With Congress unable to agree on a deal to fund the government, the waivers have lapsed, even with support from Republicans and Democrats. As a result, medical providers are deciding whether they can continue offering telehealth services without the guarantee of reimbursement or whether they need to halt virtual visits altogether.

That’s left a patient population of mostly older adults with fewer options to seek specialists or get help when they can’t physically travel far from home.

Bill Swick, right, looks around while study with his wife Martha Swick at their home in Minooka, Ill., Friday, Oct. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Swick, whose corticobasal degeneration causes symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease, can’t feed or dress himself anymore and struggles with balance and walking. Add on the logistical nightmare of driving to the city in traffic, and in-person speech therapy appointments aren’t a worthwhile ordeal for him and his wife.

But missing even a few appointments can impede progress for patients with dementia and other degenerative conditions who depend on continuity of care, experts said.

It “feels like you’re taking a step back,” Swick said in the interview.

A temporary pause, with significant impact

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Medicare only paid for virtual medical appointments under narrow circumstances, including in designated rural areas and when patients logged in from eligible sites, like hospitals and clinics.

That changed in 2020, when Trump’s first administration dramatically expanded telehealth coverage in response to the public health emergency. Medicare started reimbursing a wide range of telehealth visits, stripping the geographic requirement, and allowing patients to take calls from their homes.

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Congress has routinely extended the telehealth flexibilities and was poised to do so again before their Sept. 30 expiration. But when budget negotiations stalled and the government shut down Oct. 1, the vote never happened, leaving the program temporarily unfunded.

With more than 4 million Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries using telehealth in the first half of 2025, according to Brown University’s School of Public Health, the pause has had a major impact on an already vulnerable population.

Swick’s speech therapy services are provided by the Chicago-area business Memory and Aphasia Care. Owner Becky Khayum said many of her clients are in different cities and states and sought her therapists out because they specialize in frontal temporal dementias.

“Now suddenly without telehealth services, they do not continue to have the support to participate in those activities that are so important to them,” Khayum said. “The risk is we could see social withdrawal; we could see depression and anxiety increased.”

Virtual visits can also be useful in different areas of medicine. Dr. Faraz Ghoddusi, a family medicine provider in Tigard, Oregon, said he uses telehealth to check in and help his patients manage their conditions, like diabetes and chronic lung disease. He said that in the current Medicare telehealth pause, one of his patients wasn’t having regular check-ins and ended up in the emergency room.

Susan Collins, 73, in Murrieta, California, said Medicare-reimbursed telehealth appointments were a “tremendous relief” to her when she was a full-time caregiver for her late husband, Leo. Before he died last year from progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare brain disorder, she struggled to lift him from his wheelchair in and out of the car for his in-person doctor visits 60 miles from their home.

“He was much safer at home,” Collins said, noting that telehealth was a useful resource when her husband needed a medication or symptom consultation but not a complete physical exam.

Doctors respond differently, leaving a patchwork

The latest guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services does not ban medical providers from providing telehealth services during the lapse – but it stops short of promising they’ll be reimbursed if they do.

In response, providers are deciding whether they can absorb the risk of continuing care without assurance that they’ll be paid for it when the government reopens.

Khayum in Illinois said she had to stop providing telehealth services to Medicare patients because her small business couldn’t handle the volatility of potentially losing out on payments. Ghoddusi, the family medicine provider, said his Oregon practice is honoring telehealth appointments made before Oct. 1 but not scheduling additional ones for Medicare patients until the funding is restored.

Genevieve Richardson, owner of a speech pathology business in Austin, Texas, has stopped providing telehealth services to her Medicare clients who are spread across the country. She has been referring them to outpatient clinics in their areas who can provide stopgap services in person.

Major hospitals are also grappling with whether to provide virtual care to Medicare patients. Dr. Helen Hughes, medical director of the Office of Telemedicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine, said the hospital initially continued the care, but paused scheduling more Medicare telehealth visits as of Oct. 16 as the shutdown continued.

She said the uncertainty surrounding the waivers has been “a total roller coaster.”

The congressional stalemate persists

The government shutdown is in its fifth week with no clear end on the horizon. Meanwhile, Medicare telehealth flexibilities and a separate Medicare program offering patients hospital-level care at home both remain paused.

Mei Kwong, executive director of the Center for Connected Health Policy, said the simplest solution to renewing the telehealth waivers would be for Congress to vote separately on them.

The hands of federal health care administrators “are kind of tied,” she said. “So, you really do need Congress to act.”

But with lawmakers divided and looking for leverage, hopes for such action are low.

Martha Swick, practicing word exercises with her husband in their home on a recent morning, said if a solution isn’t found soon, “my resource collection is going to run out.”

“I’m just doing what I’m able to at home as a wife and a caregiver,” she said. “But eventually I’m really going to need those appointments to come back.”

Swenson reported from New York.