Should You Prepay?
YOU'VE GOT SOME EXTRA CASH? Should you invest it or use it to pay down
your mortgage? Look at it this way: When you prepay part of your mortgage, you
end up paying less in interest. But in the bargain, you also lose part of your
mortgage-interest tax break. Your true savings, then, can be expressed as the
difference between your mortgage interest rate and the rate at which you take
your deduction (a function of your total marginal tax rate). If that net
percentage figure is less than the amount you could make investing the cash,
you're better off investing it.
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