How Often Do You Check Your Mortgage Balance?

[Anonymous]

Occasionally but I was regularly paying in extra and recast a few times. Now paid off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Initially I checked it every month to be sure no mistakes were made. I'd like to tell myself its ok to stop doing this because its kind of depressing to see how much I still owe, but is it lazy if I check once a quarter? It's paid automatically every month so I don't need to log in to make monthly payments.

Never. Maybe once a year, I become aware of it when they send out the annual statement.

[Anonymous]

Never

[Anonymous]

Once a year when I do the taxes.

[Anonymous]

I check mine about once a month. Even though I know I am paying it down, I am visual and like to see the progress.

[Anonymous]

Probably a couple times a year? We have no escrow; if we did I’d watch it a lot more closely.

[Anonymous]

A couple times a year. Don't despair -- at first you're paying like all interest but you get a huge tax break for that the first few years and it takes the edge off. Then you start getting more into principal and the balance starts going down more quickly and you really feel like you are building equity. It takes 5-7 years to get to that point on a 30 year mortgage, though. So until then, just set your autopay and forget it.

The one thing I do check every month: we have a small escrow payment for taxes and it gets adjusted annually based on tax assessment. I do watch the balance on that because we want it to stay pretty close (don't want to overpay obviously but also if we underpay by too much it's a hassle to fix). I regret setting it up this way -- I wish we just paid our tax bill ourselves when it came. But once we set it up this way it's annoying to change so I've just left it. At least I never worry about the tax bill being paid on time (they've gotten it right 20x in a row so I feel pretty confident in it at this point). But I still check the balance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:About once a year when I'm updating my net worth statement.

I do it when I update my NW statement as well. Except I do it monthly.

[Anonymous]

Every day because I check my accounts at the end of each day.

[Anonymous]

It's held by the bank that has my checking account, so I "check" it whenever I log in to that portal. But I only look at it closely about twice a year - when the escrow hits and to see what amount is going to interest so I can guesstimate whether we'll use the standard deduction or not.

[Anonymous]

I see it every month when I make the payment. I'm on track to pay it off when I'm 81!

[Anonymous]

A statement comes monthly which I glance at when I file that month’s paperwork.

I mostly find it depressing as unlike the pp who says it goes faster after 5-7 years, we are 10 in and it doesn’t seem to be going much faster to principal. We’ve only paid off 1/7th in 10 years even at a 3% rate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I see it every month when I make the payment. I'm on track to pay it off when I'm 81!

I started laughing and pitying you and then did the math and realized I will be 74 so not much better than you 😕