Sent out another mortgage payment today, electronically — who uses stamps anymore? I added another $25 to the principal payment. While small, my trusty mortgage amortization table tells me that will shave about a year off the mortgage if I continue to throw an extra $25 at it every month until then. So imagine how the term of the mortgage would be reduced by putting MORE money toward it (I touched on this earlier this month in my post “How to shave years off your mortgage”).
Other than that, I went to my new favorite store, Home Depot. Armed with a $25 credit card, I spent $75. Epic fail. I had to get more string for the trimmer, but couldn’t open the sucker to put the new spool in. Going to have to ask Mr. Saver to help me out with his man-strength, rather than attempt it again with my puny excuses for arm muscles.
Making headway on the thank-you cards, at least. Hope to finish those this weekend. My freelance work has been keeping me extra busy nights and weekends, but we’re glad to have the extra cash padding our savings account.
It is fairly easy to set up your mortgage on a spreadsheet. If you set it up as scheduled, you can then play around with it, playing "what if" to your heart's content. I never save my "what if" scenarios, but do save each time an actual payment is made. The rest of the schedule then recalculates, and I can look down to the very last payment and see what has just happened to it.
I like my own spreadsheet SO much better than a print out from an amortization calculator tool.
I will be happy to e-mail you my spreadsheet if you would like, or to provide more detail as to how it is set up, so that your readers can do the same thing for themselves.