There's a trick to significantly reduce the length of your mortgage and save thousands of dollars over the course of your loan: Make additional payments which go to your loan principal. Borrowers use different methods to accomplish this goal. Paying 1 additional payment once a year is likely the simplest to keep track of. Of course, some folks can't pull off this huge extra payment, so dividing one extra payment into twelve extra monthly payments works as well. Finally, you can commit to paying half of your mortgage payment every other week. These options differ a little in reducing the final payback amount and shortening payback length, but each will significantly shorten the length of your mortgage and lower your total interest paid.
It may not be possible for you to pay extra every month or even every year. Remember that virtually all mortgages will permit you to make additional payments to your principal at any time. You can benefit from this provision to pay extra on your principal when you get some extra money. If, for example, you were to receive a large gift or tax refund just a few years into your mortgage, investing several thousand dollars into your mortgage principal will significantly reduce the duration of your loan and save a huge amount on mortgage interest paid over the duration of the loan. Unless the mortgage loan is quite large, even a few thousand dollars applied early in the loan period can produce huge savings over the life of the loan.
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