Biweekly Mortgage Payments: Calculate Your Savings

When you buy a home with a mortgage, your payments are due monthly by default. In an effort to pay off their mortgages faster and pay less in interest over the loan’s lifetime, some homeowners choose to make biweekly payments instead.

Why switch to biweekly payments?

If you pay your mortgage monthly, like most homeowners, you’re making 12 payments a year. By paying biweekly, you’d be paying half your monthly amount every two weeks instead. There are 52 weeks in a year, so this works out to 26 biweekly payments — or, in effect, 13 monthly payments.

If your lender doesn’t offer a biweekly payment option, don’t bother with third-party processing companies — these charge fees and aren’t necessary.

How to do it yourself

Rather than using a processor that would eat into your savings from extra payments, you can take matters into your own hands in a couple different ways:

• Take your monthly mortgage payment and divide it by 12. Make an extra principal-only payment of that amount every month.

• Take your monthly mortgage payment and divide it by 12. Save that amount every month for 12 months in a separate savings account, then make one extra mortgage payment a year using the total —  equivalent to how much extra you would pay annually on a biweekly plan.

Before you go either route, however, confirm with your lender that there are no prepayment penalties on your loan, and that the extra payments will be applied entirely to your loan’s principal rather than to principal plus interest.

Use NerdWallet’s biweekly mortgage calculator to see how much you could save over the life of your loan.