House Mortgage -- Countdown

[amarowsky]

65.6k/75K 4/10/17
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64.8/75k 5/4/17.

First month of the +$500 plan in motion. Not bad at nearly a 1k reduction.

Scaling with income raises in future, I very possibly will be paid off in <60 months.

[Gailete]

Officially made our first mortgage payment ever today. $344.90 extra applied to principal.

Fantastic. Do you have an amortization table for your loan so you can see how much interest you just saved over the life of this loan? Checking that will help give you real motivation for making those extra payments.

[james.hendrickson]

Officially made our first mortgage payment ever today. $344.90 extra applied to principal.

Outstanding, great job!

[markr867]

Officially made our first mortgage payment ever today. $344.90 extra applied to principal.

[greenskeeper]

$2380 additional principal payment for May

[Gailete]

My mortgage balance is still $0, 1 year later.

That is terrific. To be able to stand firm when all around you are going for more: the newets, the biggest, the bestest and you don't. It is one of the things that is making our personal economies so rough to live on. Even the poorest of the poor seem to want smart phones and cable TV. Used to be when someone was poor, nobody least of all them, expected to see someone on a smart phone while using a food stamp card to buy their groceries.

You seem to be well on your way to having a comfortable retirement as well! Kudos to you.

[Jluke]

Mortgage Balance: $0.00 as of May 13, 2016
Time to start saving again...

This is not intended to be a humblebrag.

My mortgage balance is still $0, 1 year later.

It has been very tempting to upgrade to a different house, where I'd "let" myself take out a ~100k mortgage plus current house value, but I have resisted. Mainly b/c my house is in good shape with regular upgrades, etc and moving to a different house will increase my tax bill by appx $3-4k/year. and would include more upkeep and unknown issues.

My former mortgage payment (P&I) appears to mostly be going to my 401k now since I started maxing that out in 2016. 2017 is not as bad since I'm able to do it over 26 paychecks whereas last year I had to accelerate it at mid-year to get to 18k.

I also have contributed to my wife's 2016 Roth and also added to my taxable. Right now I'm debating on opening another taxable account somewhere else b/c I get charged $4 per transaction with my current investment firm since they do not offer any No Transaction Fee funds that are worth investing in. And the other challenge has been pulling the trigger to invest that extra money; instead of letting it sit in my online savings.

anyways, to those who are on a similar mission to get their mortgages paid off, maybe some of that might help you prepare for that day when your mortgage is gone.

[disneysteve]

Mortgage balance: $33,648.27.
By the end of the year, we'll be under 30K.

If not for college expenses, we'd be attacking this but that will have to wait.

On the college side, our PLUS loan is at $8,645. Original principal was $15,000 in August 2016 so we're doing pretty well chipping away at that. We're consistently paying $1,000/month now so it should be gone either in December or January at the latest. There will be another loan for next school year, though, but we'll attack that one as soon as the first one is gone.

[Gailete]

Got our state tax return yesterday. Cashed it today and then divided it into payments on 4 credit cards. All rounded up and with the largest cc owing amount getting the biggest payment. All the payments were more than the monthly payment and so that part is paid and any extra I can pay on them this month is all principle payments. I should be able to put some extra on the mortgage as well, but since it has the lowest rate, I'm leaving it more or less last.

Also paid property taxes on our house and our rental porperty with the money I had set aside all year towards taxes. So nice to just write a check and know that I'm not borrowing it on a credit card. And then get ting those credit cards paid on today. Our income isn't much better than last year's but last year was a lot of hard work saving when so many things were demanding money of the very little we got in, but I did not want to borrow one more time for the property tax money!

[Randomsaver]

Focused Debt : $14K

Happy April Fool's!

Focused Debt : $13K

[amarowsky]

66k/75K 3/3/17

65.6k/75K 4/10/17

Now that the wife and I's income are united in one account, we can set our new goals in motion for saving.

We decided a 50/50 split for debt pay off and invest. I kept looking at the numbers and it just seemed a bit more wise to go this route instead of 100% invest or debt pay off. So as of now an extra $500 to principle of mortgage a month and $500 to taxable investing account a month.

It looks like I'll be getting a raise in July (estimated 5%). 1% of that will go to raising the 401K contribution. The other 4% will go towards upping these numbers. After tax it'll bump each of these up roughly $85 (mite round up to the even 100 for both).

I've also officially decided to start using all of my bonus every year to fund the wife's Roth. I max mine out now, but have only maxed her's out when I started it last year. I haven't really made a solid plan on how to fund hers. I think this is a fair enough idea, even if it falls short of full funding.

[Gailete]

I learned the rounding up game after finishing nursing school. I had about a $2000 loan and just paying it rounded up saved me several months worth of payments. It is money you generally don't miss at all. However if things are really super tight, just rounding up to the nearest dollar helps and gets you into the mind set to keep rounding up higher as you are able.

Markr - hope all goes well with that mortgage, I'm not sure I could sleep at night with that kind of mortgage. Ours is bad enough with only around $67000 owing at this point.

[greenskeeper]

Our mortgage payment is $1,815 a month, but we are planning to pay an even $2,000 and let the lender know that the extra is going towards principal.

We plan to increase that payment by at least $200 each January (to coincide with our yearly pay raises) to hopefully pay this off way sooner than 30 years.

Sounds great. There are calculators out there that you can plug in extra payments to re-amortize the mortgage and get the "new" payoff date.

[disneysteve]

Our mortgage payment is $1,815 a month, but we are planning to pay an even $2,000 and let the lender know that the extra is going towards principal.

Generally, the payment slip or online interface has a separate line for additional principal payments. Do that and you'll save a bundle.

[markr867]

Thanks for the advice, snafu and Gailete!

Our mortgage payment is $1,815 a month, but we are planning to pay an even $2,000 and let the lender know that the extra is going towards principal.

We plan to increase that payment by at least $200 each January (to coincide with our yearly pay raises) to hopefully pay this off way sooner than 30 years.