alfadriver said:
Duke said:
Just sent my last mortgage payment in this morning.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!
We have 14 more to go.
Nice! That will be done before you know it. Keep up the good work. I don't plan to go on a hookers-and-blow bender, but I do plan to replace my garage doors, renovate the bathrooms, and some other minor stuff. The rest is going into retirement funding for the final sprint.
mtn said:
Very jealous of the both of you. I only have 346 left...
It seems insurmountable, but you'll get there. We had our original mortgage all but paid off in 2009, but we basically refinanced the original loan amount in order to do renovations. Now that is paid off too.
There have been discussions, with valid points on both sides, about the desirablility of carrying a mortgage at low interest (and investing capital elsewhere) versus paying it off quickly (and ending that liability). If your goal is to pay the mortgage off as soon as possible, what we found always worked for us was to double our principal portion of the payment every month. At the beginning, that may only be an extra $150-200 each month, but the more principal you can send back early, the less interest it will cost you, and the quicker you can pay it off.
When we bought this house (our first and only) in 1993, I was 28. We put 15% down and took a 30-year mortgage of about $125k to keep the payment where we could afford it with some headroom, but from payment #1 we started doubling the principal. After about 10 years of extra principal payments, we had enough equity that we could refinance the remaining 20 years of the original loan into a new 15-year mortgage. That lowered our rate, our monthly payment, AND the total repayment amount.
Then we did the extra-principal thing again, and got that loan down to a balance under $10,000 in about 7 years, or 2010. That's when we did our renovations and borrowed $150,000 (including payoff of the old balance) on a 10-year mortgage. Principal doubling has let us pay that off in 7 years.
The nice thing about this method is that if you have a tight month, you can just revert to the normal payment, since the doubling is voluntary. But I would estimate that we've saved ourselves something like $50,000 in interest over the various loans. I know it saved us about $18,000 on this last one.
It's still been 24 years. But I'm hoping to have another 24 years rent/mortgage-free.