The ad came up for me, but if you read the fine print at the bottom of it, you can click on the part that says you don't want to contribute and the ad will go away. Simple.
As for the mortgage, we will all feel differently, and I certainly feel quite differently than the author of that article. To me, your home is what stands between you and homelessness. You should have enough homeowner's insurance to cover your losses should something happen such as the disasters he mentions. I have seen one or two folks in our condo association be naïve enough to think once their mortgage was paid off, they didn't need to carry homeowner insurance anymore. One had a water leak that damaged the unit below and she was responsible. Without her having homeowner insurance, I don't know what the outcome was since the board doesn't get involved, but it couldn't have been good.
We paid off our mortgage within 10 years and I continued to work as if nothing happened. What I felt was relief because I knew that we could easily survive layoffs or the case in which one of us gets injured and can't work for some length of time. We also were able to retire 5 years early because we had been saving for retirement for a long time. If anything, paying off the mortgage early allowed us to put more into retirement savings and therefore retire early.
We have always lived debt-free except for the time we had a mortgage. Not everybody thinks like that, nor is that important to everybody. I do read fairly often that the most frequent reason people give for stress resulting in lack of sleep is financial worry, so I would think that ways to reduce those worries would be important to at least some other folks when considering paying off a mortgage to lessen the financial burdens they may carry.
Again, I can't say that author was wrong because we each have different ways of viewing our respective worlds and differing attitudes toward our finances. All I can do is add my experience to the conversation without doing so reflecting on anybody else's opinions.
Tony
