Its a lot of common sense... but Dave is right about the emotional aspects and not just the math. This morning I transferred the balance of our Roth IRA savings over to our other checking account to apply it to the mortgage to give us a jump start.... It was so hard to transfer that money and switch focus from saving for retirement to paying down the house.
But I did it.
This month is going to be a HUGE payment month for us and I'm hoping it will help build up momentum to see a big win like this. We won't be "eliminating" a debt, but we will be paying an additional $3,613.90 on our mortgage this month -- which will definitely knock off a few months and give us a sooner pay off date, even though that's not what we are after in our time frame.
We budgeted to pay an extra $69 (the money that was monthly going to our Roth IRA savings account); we had $25.61 leftover from last months budget from categories that don't roll over; we had $10.25 in interest from all our little savings accounts and sinking funds; we had $3,269.73 in our Roth IRA savings (aka money that was waiting to go in at years end-- mostly from extra checks and money we have budgeted for daycare that we aren't using yet), and $239.31 in saved overtime that we hadn't spent.
We should also have a decent month next month too because its a 3 paycheck month for hubby this month (July) so we'll have a whole check after tithing to add to our August snowball... plus the daycare money we won't need to spend this month...
So at least we will have 2 big months of pay downs before we need to get super creative with our snowball.
I haven't commented for awhile but I think this is a great idea. You will need a bigger place and it makes sense to pay it down now. Great job on the huge payment.
ReplyDeleteThanks. We really need to keep our mortgage to a 20 year if not a 15 year and this seems like the only way for us to do it.
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