We’ve got one last debt to pay off… our mortgage. We’ve made pretty good progress, but I wish it were paid off yesterday. A while ago I came up with a plan to pay it off slightly faster than we were, but without messing up our budget or putting us in a crunch.

I ran by my wife the idea of increasing our mortgage $2/month every month. It doesn’t sound like much, but $2 is enough that over the remaining payments, it can start to add up. It’s also small enough, that we don’t really have to find something to cut out each month to make it work. We just slowly keep putting a tad bit more on there. One month it’s $2 extra, then $4, $6, $8 – you get the point.

Every month I put it into the amortization calculator (because I’m that guy) to figure out the type of impact that extra $2/month has. So far, it has dropped an extra payment off at the end of the mortgage almost ever time if we were to stop adding anything more and just keep going at the new amount forever.

It pretty much follows the rule that if you do a small change over a long period, it has the potential to make a big impact. In this case, the impact is on our mortgage.

You could use this technique with any debt payoff, building savings, or investing. Are there any techniques you’ve found to pay off your mortgage faster? Let me know in the comments below. I’d definitely be interested in hearing about them.

Photo by GotCredit