A mortgage is a huge financial investment, but paying off a mortgage does not have to be an overwhelming task.

If you want to pay off your mortgage early, you’ll find plenty of experts recommending ways to do it. All strategies work, but you’ll find some methods of paying off your mortgage are safer, faster, and more painless than others. Secrets to paying off your mortgage will shorten the lifespan of your home loan and reduce a payment schedule that might otherwise take thirty years to complete.

1. Just pay more:

If you want to see magic, start playing with mortgage calculators and see how adding a little payment to your principal here and there can shorten the length of your loan. You can use Bankrate.com’s mortgage loan payoff calculator to see how $100 or any other amount added to your payment reduces your interest and shortens the length of your loan.

2. Lump-Sum Payments:

Making a lump-sum payment on your current mortgage is one of the best known secrets for reducing the terms of your home loan. Use tax refunds, inheritance or bonus money to make additional payments on your home loan. These added contributions are interest free, so your principal amount is reduced by the amount of the entire lump sum.

3. Make Biweekly Payments:

Making biweekly payments on your current home loan is another secret to paying off a mortgage more quickly. Biweekly mortgage payments are made every two weeks rather than once a month. As a result, you will be sending in one extra mortgage payment during the course of the year. This extra payment can reduce the number of years that you will have to pay on your home loan. That payment will be entirely interest-free. This method of biweekly payments can also help with your monthly budgeting needs. According to fivecentnickel.com, the downside to biweekly payment programs is that, while many lenders offer these sorts of programs, most of them charge a fee for the privilege.

4. Refinance

One of the biggest secrets to paying off your mortgage early is to refinance your mortgage to a shorter term. For many home buyers, this means reducing the term of your home loan from thirty years to fifteen years. Depending upon how long you have resided in your home, this could increase your monthly payment drastically or it could only increase it slightly. Visit mortgageloan.com and use the free calculator to see how reducing the life of the loan will affect your payments. As an added benefit, interest rates are generally lower on short term loans.

5. Use money merge accounts (the Australian method):

In Australia, mortgages are generally set up like home equity lines of credit, or HELOCs. They double as checking accounts, thus the term “money merge.” When you get paid, you deposit your check into the account, and as you spend money you take it back out again. You hope to put more money in every month than you take out.

With a mortgage using the Australian method, interest is calculated daily instead of monthly, and because the money spends as much time as possible in the account before you take it back out to pay bills, you save on interest expense.

What’s amazing is that these techniques work equally well in business as in personal life.  It isn’t any harder to accelerate payoff of business debt than it is personal or mortgage debt.