Photo courtesy of Dea
- TikTok creator and personal finance blogger Deacon Hayes has paid off two mortgages since 2014.
- He set a deadline for his mortgage payoff, and let that deadline guide how much he needed to pay.
- Then, he increased his income to make enough to reach that monthly amount.
- Read more Personal Finance Insider coverage »
TikTok creator and founder of Well Kept Wallet Deacon Hayes knows how to pay off a mortgage. He’s now done it twice.
Buying his family’s first home in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2014, he and his wife paid off the first mortgage in 2018. When his family decided to up-size, they sold their first paid-off home, moved to another home, and then paid off their next mortgage on a home near Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2019.
In his experience, there were two things he did while making extra payments that helped him stay on track and reach the end quickly.
1. He set a deadline for the payoff
Setting a deadline allowed Hayes to get to the bottom of the mortgages faster, and within the timeline he expected.
“Setting a deadline is huge,” Hayes said. “I think that we can say, ‘I want to do something,’ but if you don’t put a deadline on it, it typically doesn’t happen.”
Not only did it make his goal more concrete, it also helped him to budget. He found it was helpful to work backwards to figure out how much was needed to put towards the mortgage each month. “Once you have a goal in mind, you have to figure out what path is going to be the best one to achieve that goal,” he told Insider.
Setting a goal created a timeline and eventual finish line, and also helped him and his wife to pace out mortgage payments realistically over time.
2. He looked for ways to earn more instead of cutting back
With a family, Hayes found that looking for ways to earn more money was more practical than decreasing the amount he spent. He found ways to use the skills and resources he already had to bring in money on the side.
Having already built a blog, he started to learn how to monetize it. “With the website, I started to figure out affiliate marketing. I started to figure out display ads and things like that, where we would get more ways to make money on the site so that we could pay down our debt,” Hayes said. He also did financial coaching on the side to make some extra cash.
For Hayes, it was all about earning more, and it’s something he suggests to anyone else who wants to pay off their mortgage quickly. “Typically some sort of side hustle is one way. Another way is to see if you can get a better-paying job by getting a promotion, or by going to another employer,” he said. Then, there’s more cash to put towards the mortgage each month.
“I think there’s so much more power on the ‘learning how to make more money’ side than the saving money side,” Hayes said. “The savings side seems restrictive, but the earning money side has power in it.”
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