If you’re dead set on paying your mortgage off early, don’t do it by paying a little bit more here and there. Save up all of you cash until you can pay it all off at once. If you put all your money into your mortgage for the next 5 years and pay the principal down to just $10k…the bank can still foreclose on you, and you would have more money wrapped up in the property that you could lose all in one day.
If nobody can convince you not to pay it off early, what you should do is take all the cash that you were going to use to pay extra on your mortgage and put it into a high interest savings account until you have enough saved to pay it all off at once. The reason, the current interest rates on high yield savings accounts are probably right about the same as your mortgage interest rate (4.5%) so your net cost is zero. (You gain the same amount in interest on your savings account as what you are paying on your mortgage). But your savings account is highly liquid and federally insured.
I know most people want to pay their mortgage off early for “security” but in volatile economic times having $200k in a savings account can give you a lot more security than having mortgage free housing. You lose flexibility and add risk when all of your wealth is tied up in a single asset that can be destroyed in 10 minutes by a malfunctioning hair dryer.
