We're paying off our mortgage in less than 5 years
By Adam Hatter | Yahoo! Contributor Network
I am not a financial genius by any means. At times in my life, I've maxed out all available credit and found myself in debt up to my eyes. But as of June 7, 2013, my wife and I are mortgage-free. That's four years and 10 months from the day we made our first payment.
Why we're paying off our mortgage
Shortly after being married in 2006, my wife and I had a new home built less than 10 minutes away from our jobs. We moved into our home in July 2008 and had our first payment due the following month. Our original mortgage was in the amount of $156,780 on a 30-year fixed-rate loan at 5.875 percent, which gave us a monthly payment of $927 (before insurance and taxes). This meant at the completion of our 30 years of dedicated payments we would have paid $333,868 (give or take) -- and $177,078 of that would go to the lender, just for having let us borrow money.
Initially we had no intentions of living in our home for more than a few years, so we only made the minimum monthly payments during the first year. The goal was to finish our attic and basement, build a deck, and then sell the home and downsize. But after the birth of our first child and deciding to have a second, we realized the house did meet our needs and we wanted to raise our children there.
Once we decided to remain in the house, we knew the sooner it was paid for the sooner we would be free from the shackles of debt; the sooner we would have the ability to use our money for more than just monthly bills.
We devised a plan to pay off the mortgage and "suffer" for a few years while our children were young. We figured while they were babies and toddlers we wouldn't want to have many adventures away from home (Disney with a 1- and 3-year old, no thanks) and they wouldn't require many high-dollar necessities (play dough and crayons provide nearly endless entertainment early on).
How we did it
We pooled resources. This meant taking every penny made and concentrating that beam of liquidity in the direction of our mortgage debt. Our household income is quite average, but when we closely examined our finances, we found that we had much more than we were putting forth to pay toward our mortgage. I'm an analyst for a day job and of course I deal with numbers a great deal, so I created my own budget sheets and amortization charts. In the end, there were several contributing factors that helped us pay off our mortgage in less than five years:
To read the entire article from Adam Hatter | Yahoo! Contributor Network : http://homes.yahoo.com/news/paid-off-mortgage-less-5-years-230600500.html
I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. -Thomas Jefferson
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