Mortgage Balance Page Updated!
As part of my ongoing effort to update the blog and bring everything current, I’ve recently started updating my Mortgage Balance page.
Home equity and paying down the mortgage have been an important part of my financial journey since long before I started this blog. In fact, when I wrote my original preface back in March 2014, I dedicated the first section to the story behind our home equity and the financial decisions that helped get us to where we were at the time.
A lot has changed since I wrote that post more than 12 years ago!
For those interested in the history, you can still read my original Home Equity preface here. While I’ve updated my Mortgage Balance page, I still need to write an updated Home Equity background post that picks up where the original story left off and provides some context for the many changes that have occurred since then, including the purchase of my current home and the start of a new mortgage journey.
Once that post is completed, I’ll add a link to it here as well.
In the meantime, I’ve begun updating the Original Home Equity Preface page itself to reflect where things stand today.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m actually more interested in tracking my mortgage balance than the equity in my home. Home values will fluctuate over time, and since I have no plans to sell or cash out the equity, paying down the mortgage is the number that matters most to me.
The page is still a work in progress, so I’ll continue adding historical mortgage balances, milestones, and other updates as I work my way through the numbers.
Like many parts of this blog, it’s fun to look back at where the journey started, see how much has changed, and continue documenting where it goes from here.
[ORIGINAL HOME EQUITY PREFACE]
Updated Home Equity Background – Coming Soon!
Really glad to see this back up and running. The choice to track the mortgage balance instead of home equity is the right call, and it's rare to see someone say so explicitly. Equity moves with the market and tells you almost nothing about your actual progress, while the balance only moves when you make it move. I've been running the same "should I even bother prepaying" question on my own mortgage (locked at 4% back in 2017) and pulled the actual 9 years of market returns against it rather than assuming a return like most of these posts do. At your rate, the math might land somewhere different than mine did. Curious what rate you locked at when you write the updated Home Equity post, since that's really the number that decides the whole strategy.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I agree—the mortgage balance is a much better measure of actual progress since it’s something I can directly control. I refinanced earlier this year into a 15-year fixed at 4.99%, so the prepay vs. invest question is definitely something I’ve been thinking about as well. I’ll get into that more when I update the Home Equity/Mortgage page.
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