Refinance or Pay off Debt

[Gareth Fisher]

Hi guys got a question related to strategic planning.

Our goal is to get down to a single income to improve quality of life.    One of the options for accomplishing this goal is I am looking at refinancing our personal home to alleviate stress on our monthly budget.  With 2 incomes it is not much of  burden, but is a little much to cover with only 1 income.

We are currently at about 50% ltv on our personal home.  6 years into a 15 yr mortgage at around 3%     If we would refi into a 30 or 20 yr this would cut our payments into half.  Decreasing our monthly expenses by about 20%.   However I ran the numbers out in a 20 yr projection.  Vs keeping the mortgage and investing heavily after its payed vs refinancing and investing the remainder.   The math says to keep it the way it is by investing our full mortgage payment after our mortgage is paid off we would amass a nice sum of money in 20 yrs about 500k more then refinancing.  However I think it would be unlikely we would both keep working after the mortgage would be paid off.  Also we don't see this as our forever home, so there is that.  Refinancing now while it is our personal home would give us a good rate and would cash flow nicely after we move out.  

 We are in our mid 30s and I think that refinancing would move us closer to our goals our monthly payments would be reduced significantly. However I am not a fan of holding lots of debt and try to manage risk.   On the other hand having lower payments would seem to lower risk.  Lots of factors at play.  Not really sure what to do.   Looking for any advice or opinions on what to do here.