Mortgage Monster Mystery

Have you ever watched a Sasquatch investigation or lochness video examination? You watch the video excerpts and begin to believe everything is doctored…this is all false. Another 15 minutes of the show convinces one the stories may be true…there’s no way to impersonate or fake this kind of data with myriad sightings and testimonies. After a double break, another segment takes one back to doubt, though still remembering what seemed irrefutable 20 minutes ago. 

Such is the discussion I read on forum after forum about the possibility of using a HELOC to accelerate one’s mortgage payoff. People spend $97 to $20,000 for such a system. I’ve blogged repeatedly on why people think the most-popular of these, the MMA from UFirst, at $3500 to participate, is a scam. There are many reasons, but the most-persuasive seems to be the $3500 price tag.

Independents swear they can do it themselves. I can’t say I disagree…I did it almost by myself. I heard about it; I bought a $25 book. I began and in only two years cut an additional $90,000 off my mortgage –besides  my regular payments! $20,000 of that was extra principal I finagled out of my home equity (a HELOC); the other almost $70,000 the interest that transfer of debt saved me! 

I persuaded my closest friends and neighbors to buy and read the same book I’d read. The only difference was they didn’t hear the 45-minute lecture that persuaded me to splurge $25 on the book. I didn’t think it made much difference, but evidently my friends did. None had started rotating money through various accounts to save on mortgage interest. 

My decade younger best friend was raising a family, had lost everything in a fire a year before…I couldn’t stand that he was paying so much mortgage interest! Even though John’s some kind of math genius, he didn’t see how it could work. He was afraid of making a serious mistake.

He knew my career as a writer, and my background as a teacher and adult educator, developer of training materials. He urged me to write a manual, more like a workbook or step-by-step, something so simple a 12-year old could follow. Within a month, John was saving enormous amounts of money on his mortgage interest. 

Here’s what I came up with, which John read and reread, commented on, made suggestions to, and this is it. (Watch the video.)