Regarding the time frame for “nothing calamitous happens”, I’d say that there are some obviously objective measures such as having enough cash or easily liquidated investments to completely pay-off the loans. Or perhaps, having multiple years of income-replacement-savings in place. And then there is the ability to measure how well we’re actually doing — are we earning more than the equivalent return if we had paid down the loans? If not, perhaps we go back to pre-paying. All that being said though, the key driver for our discussions and decision was more the general unease with the state of the economy. There’s no objective measure to point to that counters that, we’ll just have to wait until we feel better about things.

On another avenue of thought, we are considering this as a reasonable time to gauge our ability to exceed the return we get by pre-paying. If it goes very well in this environment, then we’d likely never go back to pre-paying the loans as we’d be better off to invest all available cash ourselves. If we do reasonably well, meaning we are keeping even with the return we’d get from pre-paying, then we’ll likely go back once we feel better about the balance of cash-on-hand vs. risks. And if it goes poorly, which is quite possible, then we’ll try to root-cause why and if we can’t “fix it”, go back to pre-paying.

You say, “In the event nothing calamitous happens, we can always use the funds we’ve built up to repay our loans with large single payments.” This begs the question, how do you know when “nothing calamitous happens”? In other words, what criteria are you using to determine the risk of “calamity” is low enough to start making accelerated principle payments (either incremental or lump sum) again?