Why paying off our second mortgage was a good thing

I was thinking today how grateful I am that we paid off that second mortgage over 2 years ago now. I thought I'd take a look at just how much that one financial move has made a difference in our financial life.

If we would have kept our original loan of $200,000 at 5.75% we would owe $182,390 on the main mortgage today.

Our monthly payment was $1,133.

Our second loan was $25,000 at 8.65%. If we still had that mortgage our principal balance would still be $23,644.

That monthly payment was $195.

So if we had not paid down that loan, we would still owe a total of $206,034 on the house and our monthly payments between both loans would be $1,328 (not including property taxes). Now our monthly required payment is only $1,018 - a difference of $310 a month.  We currently owe $173,369 on the house. If we sold our house today, we would make an extra $32,665 on it ($206,034 that we would have owed minus $173,369 that we actually owe).

Refinancing our main loan also helped, but I'm fairly confident our mortgage company wouldn't have offered to let us refinance that loan had we not paid off the smaller loan. If we still had both loans we would have been significantly underwater on our house at the time. Ever since we refinanced, we have paid an additional $150 in principal each month, so we are sending them a total $1,168 a month. But, even with that extra contribution we are still saving $160 a month.

So we are saving an extra $310 a month for the next twenty-something years, plus we have increased our net worth by over $32,000 - which will only get better since we are already 7 months ahead of schedule on our current mortgage just by paying an extra $150 per month. We probably won't be paying that extra money towards the mortgage had we not paid off that loan since our minimum payments would have been $310 more. Not bad for paying off a $23,000 loan early!