Ever since we bought our house I’ve been amazed at the amount of junk mail we receive related to our mortgage. And it includes all our information too, these nasty outfits know every detail about it.
A lot of them want to set you up with special payment plans that end up paying your mortgage off early. Well who could be against that? What a great deal.
Not really.
What they really want is to take your money in fees.
So their special payment plan (that you pay a bunch to set up) makes a payment every two weeks instead of once a month. Over the course of a year that means you make an extra payment, hence paying your mortgage off early.
Here’s my Super Saver Tip, actually I think I got this from Clark Howard. Take your monthly payment, divide it by 12 (months/yr). Add that amount to your monthly payment, pay that amount extra every month.
So if your house payment is $850, you divide 850 by 12 and get $70.83. Add that to your payment and you get $920.83. If you make 12 payments a year of that amount, you’ve made an extra payment. All without forking over hundreds of dollars to those sleazy direct mail scam artists.
What do you think? Am I on to something or did I overlook an important detail?
3 Responses
December 15th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Detail: You’d be four cents short of having made a full extra payment.
Detail: That’s OK.
Detail: Looks like you should add a financial tips category to your blog.
I suspect none of those qualifies as An Important Detail of the sort you seek.
December 17th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Some people recommend investing that extra $70.83/month because you’ll earn more interest from a stock or mutual fund than you’ll pay on your mortgage.
Of course, if you don’t like having a debt hanging over your head, you may just want to go ahead and pay it off. I’m not sure what I would do.
-AC
December 18th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Yeah, I received some private feedback bringing up the same point. I never really considered that too much. I’ll have to try to find out what Clark and Dave say about the matter.