As my faithful readers know, I recently took the plunge and bought a house. I've always had a habit of sending in a little extra on any payments that I have, and for the first mortgage payment I sent in a whopping extra 10 bucks. I wasn't sure how much that would save me in the long run, but I finally found a tool that lets you simulate a mortgage. It's a shareware program called Mortgage Wizard Plus. Using it, I was able to figure out that sending in an extra 10 dollars every month will cut 9 payments off the 360 payments in the loan. Saves over 4000 dollars or so in the long run. Now if I could just pay off Falkner-Mynutt before they send their goons after me...