Assumption of a mortgage by an heir after a death?

[padfun]

2. Back in the early 90's.. I took real estate classes

and got my real estate license later.

But one thing that was taught was that if you had a house that was paid off, you were losing money. This was before Trump screwed up the mortgage deduction write-off in 2017.

the reasoning was that you had all this cash sitting there doing nothing for you. They said to take out a loan and use that loan to buy another house to rent. Now you had income, and you had a tax write off. And your net worth would increase. And you could sell this other house anytime you felt pressure and have the home value increase that usually came with it.

Now the things that make this backfire is a housing market going downhill, like in 2008, or TFG getting rid of the homeowners' tax write off. So, this strategy isn't as good as it once was but still works with the current housing market.