December 19th, 2005 - Happy dance!
On Saturday, I mailed the check that will pay off our second mortgage–a 15 year mortgage paid in 4.5 years!!! It’s in the budget to be paid off next month, but I realized that if I sent next month’s payments with this month’s principal payment, I wouldn’t have to worry about remembering for taxes the little bit of interest I’d pay. Since we always have a slush amount in our accounts, I could easily pay the amount a few weeks early.
We’ve been paying extra on this from a couple of things. One, I snowballed first my educational loans then when they were paid off (18 months ago I think), that money went to the mortgage. Our tax refund last year went to it. And the amount we didn’t have to pay anymore in taxes due to having a child also went towards it! And next, it will be snowballed into paying off the primary mortgage. Woohoo! I think we can pay it off in another 10 years (10’s a lot, but that’s 15 years early!).
We now feel like we actually have equity in our house!!! It’s not a lot of equity, but with the recent reassessment, it might actually be approaching $20,000. (if someone would actually pay what the city thinks it’s worth. If not, we might have maybe $15,000. Which is still a nice number when a year ago we had about $5000!)
(Happy dance is what we do on my Motley Fool message boards whenever someone pays off a debt, or does something else equally happy and exciting.)
December 19th, 2005 at 2:05 pm EST
I discovered your blog a few weeks ago and have been enjoying it ever since. This post put a smile on my face because my husband and I call it “happy dances” when our pet rabbits leap and twirl for joy. :)
Congratulations on paying off the second mortgage. We are trying to live more simply and working on paying down our home equity line of credit (hopefully within the next year) so that we can pay down our mortgage too… we’re hoping to be debt-free in 10 years.
Jen