A lot of people don’t realise but the standard 25 year mortgage term isn’t fixed. It’s not set in stone. If you won the lottery would you keep the mortgage for the full 25 years? I very much doubt it.

If you had a monthly payment of about 500 you could decide to pay 540 instead every month. What do you think would happen if you did this for 25 years?

Let me spell out a quick example. We’ll keep figures nice and round for ease of calculations. 100,000 mortgage over 25 years at (say) 5% interest. Your monthly payment would be in the region of 580 for 25 years which is a total payback of around 175,000.

If we had an extra 5 a week to add to our payments we would be paying 600 a month now. Over the 25 years we would only pay back 170,000 and knock 1.5 years of the mortgage. That’s a 5 thousand saving.

I know it doesn’t sound an awful lot over 25 years but using a mortgage overpayment calculator we can play around with the figures and see what happens if we could pay just a little bit more.

If we overpayed by 50 every month we would get these results.

Ame example figures, but this time we pay 50 extra every month we get nearly 4 years shaved of the term and 12 thousand in cash, saved.

Using a mortgage overpayment calculator allows you to make long terms plans to save money and put the cash back in your pocket not the lenders.

Another example using bigger payments than we’ve used so far.

Let’s keep the same figures, 25 years at 5% with 100,000 borrowed. We’ll overpay an extra 100 a month. This gets us a saving of over 20 thousand and it knocks over 6 years off the term. That’s some serious savings in time and money.

An extra 100 per month isn’t easy you say. And over 18 years it’s an extra 23 thousand you’ve shelled out in overpayments.

Consider this. You aren’t paying a penny for the last 6 years off the 25. So no 680 a month payments for 6 years. Imagine what you could do with that!

Have a play with a mortgage overpayment calculator and see what you could save, you may be staggered at the savings you could make.