<prompt> Human: So I was playing around with excel and my amortization schedule. We all know that paying early will save you money, but I think I found a better way to get ahead.If you increase your monthly payment by 3 per year, then it will cut about 10 years off a 30 year mortgage. Heres how it works for a 100K mortgage at 4Payments: Year 1: 477.42mo Year 2: 491.74mo Year 3: 506.49mo .. Year 10: 641.61mo Final payment: 837.16moFirst Payment: January 2016Last payment: August 2035I like this idea since its easy to do for most people. 3 is about the nominal inflation rate and the relative change in expense is easy to absorb in a budget over a year. Even a 1 YoY increase will knock 5 years off a mortgage.Its also compatible with the Canadian mortgage market which is weird compared to the US market.Assistant: Not enough people have run the numbers to find this. For a 30 year loan, it takes until halfway through before your payments are more of the total than the amount owed than the interest.Check out this. Even skipping a latte or soda and putting 20 a month more on a loan will save you thousands of dollars over the term.Being in debt is rarely to your advantage.Human: My 30 year fixed is 3.5. After factoring in my high tax bracket, my effective mortgage rate is really 2. Run your own mortgage rate through an effective mortgage rate after tax deductions calculator. I can beat 2 with my eyes closed. My mortgage interest can barely keep up with inflation.Im going to take my time with that mortgage. Way better use of my money to invest elsewhere, and I could easily pay off the 30 year in 10 years.I dont think my situation is atypical of the sub population of people that frequent this subreddit.Assistant: Thats not quite right.Because mortgage interest is a before tax expense, you have to compare it to before tax investments. So you need to compare your 3.5 against things like bonds and dividends directly.If you convert it to after tax, then you have to compare it to other after tax gainsor expenses. So a 19 after-tax CC blows everything out of the water. Can you beat 3.5 before or 2 after-tax? Absolutely. But a risk-free 3.5 is nothing to sneeze at when 30 year US treasuries are doing 2.75.  <response>: Its pretty easy to earn higher than 2 annually with municipal bonds. 