New Mortgage Payoff Plan + Mortgage Payoff Update Q1 2021

Welcome to my first official mortgage payoff update!

I’ve definitely shared about paying off our mortgage before and even done infrequent mortgage payoff updates just to show how a biweekly schedule pays off your mortgage faster.

But this is the first official update where I’m starting with a clear goal: paying off the mortgage much faster than planned.

Let’s go!

Mortgage Payoff Update Details

In this video I’m comparing our mortgage balance from Dec 2020 to the end of March 2021. Covering the first quarter of 2021 shows how much progress we’ve made so far this year.

This mortgage payoff update shows what we’ve done in the first quarter of the year to reduce our mortgage balance without doing anything extreme. We haven’t been attacking our mortgage super aggressively because we are saving and investing heavily but I wanted to show how our biweekly payment schedule still helps us pay down the loan a bit faster thanks to extra principal payments.

Our previous mortgage balance in December of 2020 was $135,434.00.

Since then we made several months worth of payments and in March we made our $650 biweekly payment that went straight to the principal of the loan.

We also made our first principal only payment from side income which further reduced the balance.

The new loan balance on our home mortgage was then $132, 698.53.

From December 2020 to the end of March 2021, we reduced the mortgage balance by $2,735.47.

New Mortgage Payoff Plan

This also marks a major turning point in both my YouTube channel and the mortgage payoff journey because…

I started using money from THIS YOUTUBE CHANNEL to help pay down the mortgage faster!

This was the first update where I also made a specific mortgage payment toward principal only simply from my extra income on YouTube. Since I have talked about debt payoff and our mortgage so much on my YouTube channel, I felt like it was a good fit to use the income for that. I also had a ton of support on my previous video about paying down the mortgage so I will be doing a split plan for now.

Our new mortgage payoff plan involves using one of our multiple income streams to help pay down the mortgage faster.

My YouTube channel and the related income is an income stream that I will be using to help fund all our housing needs current and future, which involves paying off this mortgage!

The new plan for the income on my YouTube channel involves splitting the income three ways:

• 50% to my M1 Finance investing account to grow the money for a future downpayment in several years
• 25% to my M1 Spend account (checking with 1% apr) which acts as our house fund
• 25% to the mortgage principal to pay off the mortgage faster

This split allows me to hedge our bets since we don’t know for sure when we will truly want to buy our next home. All we know for now is that it won’t be within the year and most likely not within the next two years. Taking the pressure off myself to buy a new home sooner has meant we can work toward giving ourselves more options.

This new plan for the extra income gives us options and focuses the money where it will get the highest returns but also still allows us to payoff the mortgage. So many online arguments over mortgage payoff center around not getting the best return for your money and this split plan allows us to pursue both options – the higher investment returns and the peace of eventually paying off our home.

What Has Helped Pay Off The Mortgage Faster

I mentioned that we have not been aggressive yet with our mortgage payoff, but we have still been working toward the goal. I’m all about making big moves without a ton of extra effort so the things we’ve done have barely affected our lives but they have made a big difference to the mortgage balance reduction.

Things making a big difference in our mortgage payoff include:

• new refinanced loan (we refinanced our mortgage in 2020)
• 30 year loan moving to 15 year loan
• changing interest rates from 3.625% to 2.75%
• dropping monthly PMI payments
• paying biweekly payments
• paying a tiny bit extra each month

None of that really made a huge difference in our normal lives and budgets but it made a huge difference in how fast this will be paid off! Each little addition towards paying off the mortgage adds up to make the timeline much shorter overall.

Many small steps and tiny changes do not feel like they are doing much at the time financially, especially when you are staring at a big goal. But they do actually add up and lead you closer to where you want to be.

Never discount a step in the direction you want to go no matter how small it may be.

Mortgage Payoff Tracker Progress

In this video I caught up on tracking my mortgage payoff progress by coloring in both my tracker printable and my amortization schedule.

Having visual reminders of your progress is one of the keys to debt payoff motivation and one of the biggest ways we managed to pay off debt previously.

I’m very excited to be tracking our mortgage payoff progress in a visual way so that I can easily see how far we’ve come!

Mortgage Payoff Tracker Printable

If you are also on the journey to paying off your home, check out this mortgage payoff printable!

This home mortgage payoff printable was designed to help you stay motivated on the long journey of paying off a mortgage and it’s one of the tools I’ll be using in my own payoff process! Tracking your progress visually can help keep you on track and motivated!