Mortgage Payoff Plan Update: Oct – Dec 2019

Well, it’s NYE and we’re back with our fourth quarter mortgage payoff plan update. For our last blog post of the year, we have some big news to share! Let’s jump right into the numbers so that we can get to the good part!

The Numbers 

In the third quarter, we hit a pretty big milestone of making it below $110k for our mortgage balance. Well, that was until we got into this quarter. Check out the numbers below, and you’ll see the milestone we hit for this quarter. The numbers are as follows for the fourth quarter of 2019 (Oct – Dec):

** note: Principal refers to the regular part of our payment that goes towards the mortgage principal. Additional refers to any extra money from our budget unless otherwise stated.

October 

• Principal = 874.59
• Additional = 378.28
• Total: 1252.87

November 

• Principal = 878.46
• Additional = 3045.87
  • Budget = 1525.25
  • RSUs = 1520.62
• Total: 3924.33

December 

• Principal = 887.46
• Additional = 604.97
• Total: 1492.63

The principal balance was $135,240.09 at the beginning of 2019. At the end of the fourth quarter, we hit a milestone that we never imagined making it to when we first started this journey back in January. We made it below $100k!! The principal balance is now $99,507.37! We paid off $6,669.83 this quarter. 

Our goal for the year was to pay off $23,000 of our mortgage principal. We exceeded our goal by 55% and have paid a total of $35,732.72 for the year!

How Was This Possible?

We stuck to our 70/30 plan although we ended up using way more of the RSUs then we originally planned to. At first, we were going to use half of them. Instead, we decided to use all of them, and we don’t regret this decision at all. Why? Because the biggest chunk of our progress came from them, which will allow us to pay the house off sooner than the 6 years that we initially thought.

Here’s a breakdown of exactly where the money came from:

• Regular Principal Payments: $10,171.68
• Additional Principal Payments: $8,421.24
• RSUs Principal Payments: $17,139.80

If it wasn’t for the RSUs, we would have only paid off $18,592.92 this year, thus not reaching our goal of $23k for the year. And we’d definitely still have much longer to go in order to pay off the house. So as we’ve shared time and time again on IG, these RSUs are coming through for us in big ways!!

Our Visual

The last time we were able to color in lines on our mortgage payoff chart was back in October when we reached $105k. Since we reached below $100k practically at the end of December, we were able to color again.

Final Thoughts

Never did we imagine that we would be below $100K by the end of this year! We had a ton of conversations about what we would do with the RSUs and finally decided to use them all. The question we asked ourselves is this: “If we had a paid for house would we borrow against it to invest in this one stock?” For us, the answer was no. Not throwing all of the RSUs at the mortgage essentially has the same effect. We wondered if we might regret choosing to sell the RSUs, but we don’t at all.

So where do we go from here??? Onward and upward! In our first post for 2020, we’ll share our mortgage payoff goals for next year. In the meantime, we’re going to relish in this accomplishment! Thank you for your continued support and encouragement while we’re on this journey. We hope you have a Happy New Year!