WILL END OF MORTGAGE MEAN JOY OR UGLY SURPRISE?

Call it bittersweet.

It is a moment in life that everyone dreams of and yet, when it arrives, it may play to mixed reviews.It is that long-awaited day when the mortgage reaches the last page and it is time to declare finis! End of story. After 30 or 15 or however many years, there are no more checks to be written to the home lender.

But in this day of easy debt and easier refinancing, the end of the mortgage process is something none of the experts ever seems to talk about.

Plenty of advice - reams of it - is provided to the person who is signing up for a loan to buy that first house, or to refinance. The pitfalls of those events are described in detail; buyers often are advised to have a lawyer at their side.

But what about that seemingly distant day when the loan is paid off?

Questions abound:

-Will there be hidden costs, add-ons that will make the final payoff of the loan a gloomy event?

-Will extra scrutiny be needed to make sure there are no loose ends and to make certain that the conclusion of the mortgage process won't be tripped up by fine print in the contract?

-Will the mortgage escrow account require a costly one-time payment to handle unpaid real estate taxes or the premium for fire insurance?

-Will there be other costly and needless "garbage fees," of the type that draw warnings for new homebuyers trying to close on a mortgage?

-Will the final mortgage payment necessitate getting a fresh title search from the title company that backed the original purchase?

-Will the people at the mortgage company hand over a deed, finally proving the domicile's ownership?

-Finally, will it be time to hold a mortgage-burning party for friends and family, comparable to a house-warming?

These questions aren't just theoretical in my case, because, after 221/2 years of faithfully making monthly payments, the final days were at hand for the 25-year mortgage on our family ranch house in a far south Chicago suburb.

A stop at the savings-and-loan where the mortgage was written (now in its fifth ownership since that day in 1973), found that the amount still owed-and-due was $1,707.09.