Should you pay off your mortgage?

Bi-weekly payment schedule or shorter-term mortgages are popular among Chinese. But it is not the right concept. 

Calculating life time interest savings are meaningless. There are typically marketing gimmicks. 

1. if you pay off the day after getting the loan, you save the most, but you did not get to use the money.
2. if you can borrow a perpetuity at 1%, over the lifetime of the loan (which is forever), you would have paid the most interests, but you got to use the money forever.

While you pay more interest if you hold the loan longer or pay it off more slowly, you do get to use bank's money longer. The key is to beat the bank's financing charges while using bank's money, be it in RE, stocks, or private business. This is the idea behind the concept of opportunity cost of capital. Most TT heavy weights know this by heart. But somehow lots of Chinese folks do not like to carry loan balance.

Me personally will never prepay or accelerate the payment of 3+% mortage.

Also if you want to pay less interest, but have no other investment channel, then do not pay back faster than the loan schedule. Instead you should borrow a loan with a shorter term, which carries a lower interest rate due to shorter duration (benchmark treasury yield curve is typically upward sloping) and higher principal proportion in each payment (safter for the lender).

just my 2c. 
njrookie