Skip-A-Payment Coupon: Fill & Download for Free

My wife has always had a very full head of hair. Her hair was black when we met in our 20s by by her 40s she had some very attractive silver highlights. One night we went to to local movie theater. She stepped up to the ticket sales window being staffed by a young man who appeared to high school age. She asked for two tickets and the young man replied: “Senior discount ?” To which my wife exclaimed in loud angry tone: “What!!”. Without skipping a beat the young man said “I mean student discount”. He quickly printed out two tickets and took her payment. I looked at the ticket stubs after we went inside the theater, both were for student discount tickets. Never doubt that fear of a tight slap from an angry middle aged woman can result in a better discount than any coupon you can bring to the theater.

If you skip a payment, you are digging yourself a bigger hole. You will then have to pay late fees and perhaps other charges, your credit rating will drop, meaning that you pay higher interest.Been there, done that, in more cycles than I care to count. The only way out is through. Pay those bills on time. Economize where you can with food, clothing, transportation. Use every possible coupon or discount. Ask yourself if you really, truly need to buy this thing. Learn how to cook nutritious cheap food. Then with the few dollars shaved off of necessary expenses, put those aside in your emergency fund.

The only material advantage (i.e. reduction in total interest paid) of so-called bi-weekly mortgage payments results from the fact that you are increasing the amount of your average payment by 1/12th. If there is any advantage from your payment being credited earlier than it otherwise would be, that is insignificant.Most residential mortgages will allow you to make additional payments of principal. So for instance, if your scheduled mortgage payment were $1200, you could pay them $1300. Now, here’s the important part: you have to let them know what to do with that extra $100.How you do this will depend on how you are making the mortgage payments and how the mortgage company operates. If you’re mailing them a payment along with a “payment coupon”, it may have a box for this purpose. But in any case, just call them up and ask them how it’s done.Now when you do this yourself, without using some other company to manage it, not only do you avoid all the silly charges they impose along with the risk that they will screw it up, you remain completely flexible on it. If you just got a bonus, maybe you want to them them an extra $500 instead of $100. If you had some large expenses this month, maybe you will skip it. (Of course, this takes some self-discipline to keep up. If you don’t have that discipline, then that’s a different issue.)Now the great thing about paying that extra money is that your mortgage can be paid off a few years earlier, that ‘s a few years sooner when your budget no longer has to allow for the payment of principal and interest. It’s a really nice thing when you reach that point, and the sooner the better!