There's a trick to significantly reduce the length of your mortgage and save thousands of dollars over the course of your loan: Make additional payments that go toward your principal. Borrowers use different methods to accomplish this goal. Making one extra full payment once every year may be the simplest to arrange. If you can't pay an additional whole payment all at once, you can split that large amount into 12 smaller payments and pay that additional amount monthly. Finally, you can commit to paying a half payment every two weeks. Each of these options yields slightly different results, but they will all significantly reduce the length of your mortgage and lower your total interest paid.
It may not be possible for you to pay more every month or even every year. But you should remember that most mortgages allow you to make additional principal payments at any time. Any time you get some unexpected money, you can use this provision to pay a one-time additional payment on your mortgage principal.
If, for example, you receive a very large gift or tax refund five years into your mortgage, investing several thousand dollars into your mortgage principal will significantly shorten the repayment duration of your loan and save enormously on mortgage interest paid over the duration of the loan. Unless the mortgage loan is very large, even a few thousand dollars applied early in the loan period can produce huge benefits over the duration of the loan.
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