#61: Extra Mortgage Payment

I read an old article a couple of years ago about how making an extra mortgage payment each year will significantly reduce the amount of interest paid, and also decrease the time spent paying off the home loan. Like last year, in 2007 I've made an effort to follow this plan, even though we're planning to sell our house in 2008. At least we'll see some benefit from having more of our house paid off, so that will hopefully translate into more $$ from the sale to put towards whatever new home we find. Actually, I say that we followed the plan in that article--we didn't make two mortgage payments a month. Instead, we took the amount of one mortgage payment and divided by 12, then put that amount into savings each month. Thanks to ING, we were able to earn pretty good interest on that money while we saved throughout the year, and were still able to benefit from putting the amount of one mortgage payment towards our principal.

Unfortunately, I still have not made a lot of progress on the other items on my list that are financial goals: invest for retirement beyond 401Ks and review personal budget to increase savings. I know a lot of people recommend Dave Ramsey's books and I've also heard good things about a couple of other books (Smart Couples Finish Rich and The Millionaire Next Door, in particular). I think I may know and follow some of the key strategies in these books already, I just need to actually DO them. But, this is a good reminder to be proactive. I'll have to add those to my list of books to look for during my trip to Half Price Books this week--I heard this morning on the radio that they're having a 20% off sale through Saturday!