Using Mortgage Calculators to Eliminate Debt

I have found using mortgage calculators essential to understanding and eliminating my mortgage. Calculators can help when making decisions about the repayments. Understanding how extra repayments will affect the debt keeps me motivated when it begins to seem to difficult. Wooley Woman has asked me to share the calculators I use. There are four.

Loan Repayment Calculator

Extra Repayments Calculator

Lump Sum Repayment Calculator

You need to know the amount, the term and the interest rate. I like these calculators because they have a interactive graphics as well as text.
Enter you information, move the mouse over the graphed area, you can make the graph shaded by ticking the box. I have the graph for repaying the mortgage in 5 years stuck in the front of my new Bills folder so I see it every day.

Play around with the numbers and the savings you can make will astonish you.

Try the extra repayments calculator to see how much you save just by paying an extra $20-30 a week. We have always paid extra. When we first moved into our home interest rates in Australia were 18% !! Even then we paid weekly and rounded up the amount with an extra $10 or so. Money was tight then as our children were young and we earned less. It was tight at times.

Five Years later when we suddenly found ourselves both out of work for 6 months (through a layoff & illness) we were 9 months ahead in our mortgage. If we had not been ahead we would have lost our home for sure. Instead we had 9 months mortgage free to find work, luckily it only took six!

In Australia the option to pay mortgages weekly has always been available and well used. I have been told that this is relatively new to other countries.

The other calculator that I use is:

Amortization Calculator

**It really is worth the time to use it and understand what it means if you are serious about eliminating mortgage debt.**

Enter you loan amount, the interest and the term only. In view results put yearly then submit. Now scroll down to the yearly payment schedule. Notice how much interest is paid each year and how much principal. It can be a shock to realise that at the end of the first year or two you may have only paid a few hundred dollars off your actual mortgage.

OK now you are over the shock you can use this information to your advantage. If you can pay the amount in the left column, principal paid, ahead of time, then you effectively save yourself a years worth of payments. You jump down to the next line.

So simple it kind of stuns you doesn't it.

Try it for yourself. The more you can pay in the early years the more you save. The calculators can help you see for yourself that small amounts can make a huge difference.

So why not crunch some numbers for yourself and come back and share what you found.