Friday, January 23, 2009

Paying down the mortgage

I am working on our monthly budget for the new year in my Quicken program and just realized something. In a few months we will have more of our monthly mortgage payment going toward principle than toward interest! That's never happened before!! We used to have a 30 year mortgage and only about $200 each month went toward the principle...way less than what was going toward interest. We refinanced last year to a 15 year mortgage and I'm so amazed at how quickly the numbers are changing.

Another exciting thing for us is that my husband just got a sort-of promotion at work and will be getting a raise along with it. Since we have a fully funded emergency fund (baby step 3 per Dave Ramsey) and are already putting 15% of our income into retirement (baby step 4 per Dave Ramsey) we will be able to dump all of his raise onto our mortgage every month. I'm excited to see those numbers go down even faster!! Take a look at your own budget and your mortgage and see if you can do the same thing. What a great feeling it will be when we can finally say that we OWN our house!

1 comment:

Audra said...

good for you Lisa. YOu guys are doing so good. We are still hoping to have ours done in the next 5 years, and hopefully sooner.