Paying off your mortgage early is always a smart investment. Most mortgages don’t have prepayment penalties. Some ways of prepaying can be more burdensome than others, but you can really dent the term of years on the loan by taking some simple conscious steps. If you are ready to be a financial over-achiever and remove the burden of your mortgage faster than anticipated, take a look at the following tricks to help you get the job done:

Round it Up

If you’re paying $764.82 per month on your principal balance, you can round it off to $800.00 per month. It only costs you about $1.13 per day to do that, and you’ll knock years off of the term of your loan. Just figure that rounded up number into your monthly bills, and after a while, you won’t even notice it.

One Annual Principal Payment

The rounding off example comes to about 50 percent of one annual principal payment. If you make one single extra principal payment per year, you reduce your loan term to 26 years. Two extra payments per year reduces it down to somewhere around a 20 year mortgage. If you really want motivation, try using an accelerated mortgage calculator to get the exact numbers for your mortgage and see how many years could potentially be taken off.

Invisible Refinancing

It’s going to cost you thousands to refinance. If you make payments as if you’ve refinanced, you’re paying down at the refinanced rate without the expenditure required for the refinancing. Banks love refinances. They get up front fees, plus you start all over again. Why start all over again time and time again to pay that mortgage off when you can be ahead by invisible refinancing?

A Dollar a Month

If you are pretty strapped when it comes to your finances, you might feel like you couldn’t possibly pay any more on your mortgage than you already are. If this is your situation, consider this: every month you can increase your mortgage payment by $1.00. That’s a whopping $12.00 over the course of a year. By the end of the second year, you’ll be paying $24.00 a year more. Do you think you can afford that? Keep doing it and you can reduce your mortgage term to less than 50 percent of what it originally was.
 
If you’re like most people and taking out or already paying on a 30 year mortgage, that’s a long time, and very significant interest attaches. Think of adding a nice chunk of money to your retirement account without even blinking. You might also want to check your insurance costs every year and see if you can save. If so, add that extra money into your home’s equity. No matter what tactics you choose to try, keep in mind that every time you pay a little more, you are a few inches, minutes, and dollars closer to being rid of your mortgage payments for good.