I've blogged about UFirst before, but I can't get them out of my mind. You see, I write about saving money on your mortgage without refinancing, in principle, the very business UFF is in. But I recommend learning the concept and doing it yourself instead of popping $3500 for the bells and whistles that come with their "pay off your home years sooner" program. In fact, I recommend you take that $3500, put $3403 on your mortgage principal immediately, then spend the remainder, $97, on "Let your Mortgage Make You Rich!"–a program I had a hand in developing.

So why do I keep writing about the MMA scam? I'm actually all over the Internet saying United First Financial is not a scam. They should pay me, I defend them so much. Especially in one forum where a bunch of people who can't do math constantly decry it. Then MMA sales reps come in, try to explain things, and sometimes get banned from the forum.

I just spent most of the day cranking out another original article about UFF and their baby, the Money Merge Account. It was a big job, because I've written so much about them before, I wanted to come up with some new material. Now I'm awaiting approval from a syndicator.

One thing I haven't put in writing, I believe, is how their free three-page analysis works out. There's a real simple little online calculator a friend of mine hired a programmer to put together. I think the guy was paid $35. I invented the questions. You can take it for a spin here: Mortgage calculator. The idea is to suggest to you how much you could save on your mortgage if you used the equity in your house (paid for portion) to reduce your mortgage balance (unpaid for portion) in a lump sum, so your remaining interest would be less.

I've never seen United First Financial's analysis. But I talked to a sales rep who told me how much it projected he would save. I asked him to pop over to our little online Mortgage calculator and see how it compared. It was uncanny. The answers were very close. Maybe I shouldn't confess this, but that early payoff calculator is based on what I did to cut $70,000 off my own mortgage in two years. And what I did was based on a hunch. It worked out for me, then it worked out for a few friends, so we wrote it down and called it "a program."

The irony is that United First Financial hired an aeronautical engineer from General Electric and spent millions of dollars working on the algorithms, software and computer interface. I'm sure it's prettier than mine. They could have had him call me, since Let Your Mortgage Make You Rich has been on the market longer than the Money Merge Account. I would have shared my hunch. Then we could have split the money and both had pretty calculators.

Of course I'd rather people buy my program than United First's. I'm sure they feel the same way toward me, that people are better off using their fancy software than simply cycling their income and expenses through their home equity line of credit like the diagrams in Let Your Mortgage Make You Rich show. There's a comprehensive explanation of how it works, but I've also reduced it to a 1-page 8 X 10 poster!

The truth is, I get a lot of business from United First Financial's dedicated sales force. They're all over the country, like mortgage missionaries, persuading people they can and should pay off their homes years sooner and save tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Incredulously, those prospects go online to see whether the MMA is a scam. They look it up with words like these "united first financial scam," or to be a little wordier, "is united first financial a scam?"

I hope they find out it isn't. As I said. I defend UFirst all over the Internet. Sort of. Every chance I get, I add, Buy my workbook instead and save yourself $3300!

Are you getting my mortgage savings tips my email? The first two are absolutely painless ways to cut down how much interest you pay–guaranteed.