5 Ways to Double Your Mortgage Payment

My husband and I recently bought a house. I joked about how signing a 30-year mortgage was more terrifying than committing to marriage for the rest of my life. I hated looking at the numbers of how much money in interest we would be paying over the next thirty years, and we resolved to pay our mortgage off faster. In the last four months we have doubled our mortgage payment each month, and this is how we did it.

1. We rent our extra rooms through Airbnb! I am planning on posting a lot more about this on the blog soon. We live in a five bedroom home, and one of the first things we did after moving in was to furnish all of the extra rooms. We listed them on Airbnb, and within 12 hours we had 14 inquiries for short term and long term stays. We ended up doing a bunch of short term stays and now we are hosting three long-term guests (each for around three months). I recognize that this doesn’t work for everyone, but we have had an awesome experience with this. Read more here.

2. We started tracking our finances and budgeting more seriously. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is so much easier to just pay your bills and check your bank account balance once in awhile instead of actually going through and looking at where your money is going. Once we started looking at it more seriously and in depth, we had a better idea of different things that we could cut out of our budget. One tool that we use is Mint. It’s an easy way to get all of our account and finances in one spot for easy tracking. We also use Acorns to invest our spare change.

3. Meal plan and limit eating out. In my senior year of college, Collin and I lived in a little one bedroom apartment downtown. I wasn’t able to work with my course load and internship, so we relied on his part-time coffee shop and part-time school subbing paychecks. I think that the main way that we survived that year was with the intense meal-planning and freezer meals that we would make. We would buy in bulk and then make a bunch of freezer meals to last us until the end of the month. Plus we would shop at Aldi (and we still do!). We wouldn’t eat out for months at a time, and it saved us a ton of money. It also helps to have a few go-to lunches in case you don’t have leftovers to bring to work. Here is a link to a freezer meal night I hosted last week.

4. Future-focused. Collin and I started discussing what our financial goals were for the next year, five years, and ten years. We love the idea of owning more property to rent out as an extra income, so we have decided to aggressively pay off our mortgage for the next two years, and then start saving up for another property. It’s important to have these conversations with your partner! Thinking about the future also helps me stop trying to “keep up with the Joneses.”

5. Cut unnecessary bills (i.e. cable). We have Netflix, and that is all that we need. We don’t own a TV and we do not have cable, so that is $40-200 that we save per month. We originally made this choice because we wanted to spend less time watching shows and more time reading, being with friends, or hosting, but it has saved us a lot of money in the last few years. We also recently switched phone bills to a cheaper plan to save $15 per month.