Paying down the mortgage
One of my goals is to pay off our mortgage by the year 2011, becoming COMPLETELY debt free. That means that to make my share of the payments, I need to pay down $54,000 over the next four years, while also aggressively funding a variety of savings, investments, and pet projects. (And paying my regular bills too, of course.) I’m going use a variation of the method I used to pay off my approximately $10,000 student loan balance in four months. I think it’s completely doable.
Here are the stats on our loan:
- Starting balance of $120,000 in March of 2004
- 20 year term (I’d originally thought it was a 30 year loan, but a look at the paperwork revealed that happy error.)
- 5.625% interest rate
- Current balance of $107,534.22
- Minimum payment of $833.96 per month (principal and interest only; we “self-escrow” our taxes and insurance)
- As of our March 1st payment, $507.68 per month was going toward interest. This has been going down by about $3 each month, so I expect about $504 of our April payment to go toward interest.
My immediate goal was for us to be paying more toward principal each month than we were paying in interest, and we’ve already reached that goal. (We’ve paid a total of $771.28 toward principal so far this month, which includes additional payments totaling $445.)
My next goal is for us to begin paying at least $1000 toward principal each month.
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March 25th, 2007 at 10:46 am
I’m not generally a fan of paying down mortgages, but with the way the market is going right now, I’m not sure its a bad idea. I was listening to a successful investor friend of mine talk about how we are not in a real estate bubble- but a credit bubble. When credit dries up, cash goes into hiding- so they are paying down some of their lareger mortgages and moving to cash postitions.
March 25th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
This comment has nothing to do with the post above. But, I really like the fact that you increased the text size of your blog! It all looks awesome!
NCN
(BTW, paying off debt ALWAYS rocks! Great job!)
March 25th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
That’s great–and I really like the larger font too! Helps these eyes out alot! Thanks.
March 25th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Do you guys think I should make it even bigger? I was debating between this size and a slightly larger one.
March 26th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Well, give the bigger one a try–I would appreciate it. Thanks!
March 26th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Ok, I upped the font just a little more on the center column.