Pay off mortgage early. That’s quite the statement. Financial goals they can seem daunting or exciting. Debilitating or exhilarating. Sometimes, a combination of everything.
This year we are challenging ourselves to try and meet a pretty big financial goal. We pay our mortgage (and taxes and insurance) each month but we are going to put a much larger chunk for the next 18 months towards paying extra on our principal!
Pay Off Mortgage Early
Is paying off your mortgage early important to you?
Let’s get down to what this is going to mean in our life.
How Budgeting Looks in Our Home:
My husband works in Christian radio and I work 24 hours a week at our church.
We budget off of my husband’s salary and work hard to make it possible. Even to make it possible, we have to eliminate certain categories and have others less than we’d like, but we want to know that we could live off of that income if we had to.
The money I earn we budget separately. Here is where the “extras” come out of. Things like:
- Vacations
- Extras for clothing (to supplement the very little that comes out of our regular budget)
- Putting extra towards saving goals – new cars, storm shelter etc
- Putting extra to pay of mortgage early
- Projects we want to tackle around the house
- The list goes on. We sit down and look and see what’s going to be happening each month and decide what we are going to do with the money.
Our Financial Goal
This year, we are going to be doing something a bit differently. We are going to be budgeting (and living) off of my husband’s income as usual.
Where the big change comes in, for the next 18 months we are planning on every penny I bring in (after giving) going towards our plan to pay off mortgage early.
It will be tight. We’ll have lots of decisions to make and I’m sure it won’t be easy. I’m guessing that there will be times when we wish we could just use a hundred dollars. We’ll have to say no to lots of things we want to do.
At the same time it’s exciting.
It’s exciting to set a big goal and see it get chipped away at.
Each thousand dollars that comes off of the total will be exhilarating.
Seeing the difference short term sacrifices are making will be exciting.
Not only is it exciting (and scary) I think my husband and I will see plenty of other benefits over the next months besides the obvious perk of our mortgage disappearing.
Benefits of Tackling a Financial Goal as a Couple:
- Our creativity and trust will be stretched.
- Extra motivation to try and increase our side income projects.
- We’ll have to be resourceful to come up with money for things we want or need that come up during the year.
- We will learn to be content with what we have.
- As we tackle this big project together, hopefully our communication and relationship will be strengthened.
I’m looking forward to 18 months from now and hopefully having our home paid off and being able to look back over that year and half and see how the sacrifices and determination paid off!
What financial goals have you tackled? Did you see benefits from it? Pay off your mortgage early – is that a phrase you’ve thought of before?
Did you set any big financial goals this year?
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