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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.