The benefit to putting extra payments on the mortgage comes from the compounding effect. The more you pay-off the less principle there is to accumulate interest. I would suggest going to bankrate.com or somewhere else that would show you a amortized payment schedule. Their calculators let you see the difference if you were to add extra payments versus not. On a $100,000 loan (30yr fixed at 6%) adding $100 per month ends up saving you $40,000 over the life of the loan.
As far as putting your money in a MMA and then waiting to payoff a larger lump sum...you would have to have a pretty good MMA interest rate. The MMA rate would need to be higher than the loan rate to even consider that, otherwise your still going to lose money to interest.
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