I was doing my usual PF blog reading this morning with coffee and stumbled upon an interesting link at  Gail's Blog . She does not give links all willy  nilly so I knew it must be of value.

It directed you to a site that shows you their budget app, which was interesting, but even more so was a tool I found on the site. It allowed you to plug in your loan/mortgage info and see how much faster you could pay it off with different extra amounts.

It's here at Dough . It shows  a double spreadsheet...one side with your regular payments only and one with what it would be if you accelerated your loan.

It was bang on, on the regular payment side, letting me know I have 46 payments to go, how much interest/principal for each one etc.

My new budget has $400 set aside each month for additional payments on the principal. By plugging this new information in I was able to see that I have 26 months left and save a nice chunk of interest. $1700 to be exact. Now that is lovely news!!!

I further plugged in $600, which is what I consider a full month lump sum payment, I would be done in 21 months.

$400 a month extra would mean I would be done paying my loan in August of 2012 instead of April of 2014.

Sounds very exciting for me.

I know life happens and things change but for now I am going to work on that $400 a month and see how long I can sustain that before life changes and I need to retinker with my budget.

Try the app if you don't already have one like this. (It is right on the webpage so no downloading required. No log in or fee either!)

Happy Tuesday.