How We Are Paying Off Our Second Mortgage

Hi All,

This weekend our good friend Brad paid me a visit. In addition to discussing his love life, we chatted a bit about our blog - well okay, I wanted to talk about the blog - Brad wanted to discuss his love life. However, it did come up that we sometimes don't give enough specific examples in our postings. So, in this one we wanted to give you more details about how we've been paying off our second mortgage.

1) Reprioritizing:

All of our funds from stock dividends, blog income, prosper.com, and our investment property are going to the payoff the trust. Much of our salaries are going into it also. We will be applying big blocks of Miel's income when a couple of administrative issues get cleared up with her job. So far, we've been able to drum up $900 per month from these sources. The actual amounts we pay are shown below.

2) Linked Accounts:

Nearly all of our finances are linked electronically. Our prosper and brokerage accounts are linked to our checking accounts. Our paychecks are direct deposited into our checking accounts also. Finally, our checking accounts are connected to the mortgage account. This ensures that when funds become available, they can be quickly used to pay off the mortgage.

3) Credit Card Arbitrage:

Miel applied for and received a Citbank Professional Cash Card. The card has a 0% balance transfer rate for 12 months. We intend to transfer $9,000 of our mortgage debt onto this card. This should result in an approximate interest savings of $570 over the next few months. Miel shopped around and got a better than standard offer for the balance transfer.

Here is a screenshot of our second mortgage payoff so far: