Save thousands on your mortgage


Taxes : Save thousands on your mortgage	Homepage \| Add to Favorites

Recommended Sites

Related Links

Informative Articles

Five Reasons the Economy Will Crash and Will Stay Crashed
If the U.S. economy had to be summed up in one word, the word would be unsustainable. From entitlement programs to trade deficits, the U.S. economy cannot continue indefinitely on its current course. Sadly, changing course is difficult and...

Here's How Factoring is Better than a Loan or Line of Credit
When business owners realize they have a cash flow problem and start looking for ways to solve it, the first thing they usually do is call their banker or the SBA. The second thing they do is discover all the financial and credit...

Paying Your Bills On Time
You've heard it before. "You always have to pay your bills on time or it will hurt your credit rating". The fact is that not paying your bills on time can also cost you a bunch of money. The last time I checked being late on a credit card payment...

Tax fraud and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Tools
What is tax fraud, and how does our government control it? That's a really big question to answer, so let's break it apart and answer it in two different paragraphs. Tax fraud is the intentional avoidance of tax due by a taxpayer, corporation,...

The Internal Revenue Service
Do you ever wonder, how a country that revolted because of the unfair taxation of tea, came to be under the tight control of the Internal Revenue System? It seems kind of ironic, doesn't it, that the very reason we were founded, unfair taxation,...

Save thousands on your mortgage

One way of saving thousands of dollars on your mortgage is by switching your payments from monthly to weekly or fortnightly.

Weekly or fortnightly mortgage payments have been growing in favour with home owners across Australia and many institutions now offer these payment options. The fascination with more frequent payment options is that if they are done correctly you can take several years off your mortgage amortization and thus own your home free and clear years ahead of paying on a monthly basis.

Why is this? The trick is in how the weekly or fortnightly payment is calculated. To achieve the rapid amortization you would take the monthly payment amount and divide it by four (weekly payment) or by two (fortnightly payment). By doing this you end up reducing your mortgage principal each year by the amount of the monthly payment.

A simple illustration will help explain. If for example your monthly mortgage payment was $400.00 you would make a total yearly payment of $4,800.00 (400 X 12 months). By dividing the $400.00 by 4 you would have a weekly payment of $100.00 and thus pay a total yearly amount of $5,200.00 (100 x 52 weeks). Similarly by dividing the $400.00 by 2 you would have a fortnightly payment of $200.00 and again pay a total yearly amount of $5,200.00 (200 x 26 fortnightly pay periods). You can see from this example that both alternate payment methods result in an additional $400.00 ($5,200 - $4,800) being applied to your mortgage each year which comes directly off the principal. These accelerated payments can reduce a 25 year mortgage amortization down to 21 years. That's four years of mortgage payments saved. Since you pay your mortgage with "after tax" dollars, think of what you would have to earn before taxes to see the true impact of the savings.

Weekly and bi-weekly mortgage payments are thus another form of forced saving and these options are certainly attractive for those whose employment pay periods fall the same way. However, not all weekly mortgage payments are calculated using the rapid amortization process noted above so you may have to confirm this with your broker or lender.

About the author:

Peter Roderick is a mortgage specialist and Director of Refund Home Loans Beechmont. For more information, articles, news, tools and valuable resources on home or investment loan, refinancing, debt solutions, visit this site: http://www.refundhomeloans.com.au or email peterroderick@refundhomeloans.com.au to register for our free monthly newsletter.