I can see why he would say that because your prolonging your term again or it increases your monthly payment by refying to a 15 year, if you decide to do that.

Hey BP Family,Not sure if you only give advice on investments but my parents are still living in the same home they've owned for 20+ years but I'm sure they have refinanced and whatever else you can do to prolong paying it offMy dad mentions selling the house all the time but isn't taking action for whatever reason.

As a Mortgagee you don't control the property, so a borrower who might over capitalize an investment may also stick to an unrealistic sale price which prolongs the sale which can eventually cause delinquency and default.  

My intention was to highlight that we've been in a prolonged period of very cheap capital and that it is looking more and more probably that going to come to an end and the cost of capital will begin to move back towards historic averages.I do realize that in the U.S.A. residential mortgages are predominately fixed-rate, fixed-term where the term equals the amortization.  

@Mindy Jensenis right, there are good debt and bad debt.The worst case scenario is just you can't rent out the property for a prolonged period and you need the cashflow to support the property.Ask yourself: how likely is that?  

I wonder if at some point the amount can be less due to having "economies of scale" with income from multiple units available to cover catastrophic situations or prolonged vacancies in one or two units.

They should be serviced regularly to prolong life.

The code further defines capital expenditures as an expense to prolong the life of the property among other things which are subject to depreciation.

The big risk is a prolonged vacancy combined with unexpected expenses.  

Especially with the past few years we have experience times of prolonged power outages due to storms.