Back in February my wife and I purchased our first home.  Our first payment was due April 1, and posted on April 10.    As of today, we have made 6 regular, scheduled monthly payments.  We have also made 4 additional payments – payments which are applied directly towards the mortgage principal.

We have a conventional 15-year mortgage and we want to pay it off as soon as is possible.  Our mortgage lender has a great amortization calculator, which allows us to compute the impact of extra payments.  It’s great for calculating the impact of regularly scheduled, equal payments, but I wanted a more flexible calculator, one which would allow me to calculate the impact of extra payments, regardless of schedule or amounts.

I searched around a bit and found this spreadsheet, over at The Mortgage Professor’s Website. It helps me to do just what I wanted.  I downloaded the spreadsheet and used it to calculate various payoff scenarios.  Click on the link and look for the spreadsheet labeled Extra Payments on Monthly Payment Fixed-Rate Mortgages. It’s very simple to use – and kinda fun to play with!

Had we chosen to simply make our regular monthly payments, without any additional payments, our original mortgage balance would have been reduced by 2.34%.  However, we chose to make 4 extra payments, so our original mortgage balance has been reduced by… wait for it… wait for it… 2.86%.  That’s right, my friend, an extra .53% – gone!

Okay, okay.  .53% extra isn’t that big of a deal, but it is a start.  Even at this modest rate, we’re already on our way to turning our 15-year mortgage into a 13-year mortgage!

Moving into a new house was exciting, and we spent the first few months sprucing things up.  Now that we have things “like we want them” we will turn our attention towards paying off our mortgage.  We will be sensible, but we will push ourselves.

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